Prices as of Friday, September 4, 2026, 7:19 p.m. ET, pulled from Kalshi's public market feed; every dated claim in this piece links its source. The hand-drawn illustration at the top was last redrawn on August 26 and still shows that day's board (hold 67, hike 33); the text was rewritten Thursday afternoon and again Friday evening after the jobs report, and what follows is the nine days since the August 26 edition.
Will the Fed cut rates in September? No, and it may raise them. The Federal Reserve meets September 15-16, 2026, with the decision at 2 p.m. ET on the 16th. As of September 4, 2026, Kalshi prices a quarter-point hike at 51-52 cents, a hold at the current 3.50%-3.75% at 47-48, and a cut at 0-1; 51 cents means a 51% chance. Traders have flipped between hold and hike all week on Fed speeches and the jobs report, and the first meeting where a cut is bid above a penny is October 28, at 3 cents bid against a 4-cent ask.
The market's answer to "will the Fed cut rates in September" is still a penny. On Kalshi, where a price in cents is the market's probability, the contract that pays out on a quarter-point cut is zero bid against a 1-cent ask, where it has sat through every edition of this page since August 18. The live question is the other one. The headline on this page says traders are betting on a hike, and as of Friday evening they are again, by four cents, after the hike and "Fed maintains rate" swapped places twice in 24 hours. Governor Christopher Waller's "give disinflation a chance" remarks at 8:30 a.m. Thursday made the hold the favorite by lunch; the August jobs report at 8:30 a.m. Friday handed the lead back to the hike inside 20 seconds. That was the week in one sentence, and this page has the trade-by-trade tape for both mornings below, along with the reason a strong payroll print did not send the hike back to Tuesday's 62-cent high.
What moved it Friday was a number, not a speech. The Bureau of Labor Statistics said nonfarm payrolls rose by 162,000 in August against a Dow Jones consensus of 53,000, with unemployment unchanged at 4.1%, per the BLS release. The gain was five times "the average monthly gain of 31,000 over the prior 12 months," in the bureau's words, and the revisions cut the other way from the summer's story: July's loss of 23,000 jobs is now a gain of 21,000, and June was revised up from 20,000 to 31,000. Bars and restaurants added 59,000, local government education 42,000, manufacturing 16,000; the information sector lost 23,000. Average hourly earnings rose 0.3% on the month to $37.75 and 3.1% over the year. "Net, net, the labor market is alive and well and generating thousands of new jobs to help keep economic growth squarely in the plus column," Fwdbonds' Chris Rupkey said, per CNBC's Jeff Cox, who reported traders "were still pricing in about 60% odds" of a quarter-point hike on CME FedWatch after the report. That tool had read 48.4% on Thursday after Waller. Yahoo Finance's Claire Boston put the move in September hike odds as "to around 60%, from close to 50-50 on Thursday," and quoted Principal Asset Management's Seema Shah on why it stopped there: "Markets may edge up their expectations for a September hike following today's release, but next week's CPI report is still likely to be the key swing factor for policy."
The record this page was built on has not changed. On July 29 the committee held rates at 3.50% to 3.75% on a 9-3 vote, with Beth Hammack, Neel Kashkari and Lorie Logan each preferring "to raise the target range by 1/4 percentage point," per the Fed's own statement. The minutes of that meeting say "many participants assessed that policy tightening would likely be necessary if inflation did not decline." July PCE prices rose 3.7% over the year with core at 3.3%, per Yahoo Finance's August 26 report. What changed this week is that the labor half of the hawks' case, which the July payroll loss had taken away from them on August 7, came back on Friday with a revision attached, and the market still priced it as the smaller of the two reports left before the vote.
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The Board
As of September 4, 2026, 7:19 p.m. ET (Kalshi, cents = probability; first number is what buyers offer, second what sellers ask):
| Outcome On September 16 | Yes price (bid / ask) | Reads as | Thursday's close (minor rungs: Kalshi's prior reference) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hike A Quarter Point | 51¢ / 52¢ | about 52% | 42 cents |
| Hold At 3.50%-3.75% | 47¢ / 48¢ | about 48% | 57 cents |
| Hike More Than A Quarter | 1¢ / 2¢ | about 2% | 1 cent |
| Cut A Quarter Point | 0¢ / 1¢ | about 1% | 1 cent |
| Cut More Than A Quarter | 0¢ / 1¢ | about 1% | 1 cent |
The "reads as" column is taken from the ask side, which is why it sums a little above 100; the gap is the spread. The contract settles on the target range the Fed announces at 2:00 p.m. ET on Wednesday, September 16; a hold means the range stays at 3.50% to 3.75%, a hike means 3.75% to 4.00%. The sibling market that asks whether the rate will be above 3.75% after the meeting tells the same story from the other side: 50 cents bid, 51 ask, against Kalshi's prior reference price of 44 cents; the hike rung's own prior reference is 45. There is real size behind the flip. Over the last 24 hours the hold rung traded 1.08 million contracts and the hike rung 304,000, on 9.78 million and 3.81 million contracts open; since the market listed, 13.9 million hold contracts and 6.8 million hike contracts have changed hands, and Kalshi reports those totals in dollars of contract face value, one dollar per contract, the way the exchange displays them. The penny cut is not idle either: 385,000 cut contracts traded in the same 24 hours, and every one of Friday's 128 prints was at 1 cent with a buyer on the taking side, which is what a lottery ticket looks like on a tape. Kalshi stops trading all five September contracts at 1:59 p.m. ET on the 16th, one minute before the statement, and the rate ladder at 1:55; there is no trading into the print. The related hike-by-December market is the place to watch whether Friday's buyers think the hike is September's or just this year's.
Friday's trade feed puts a clock on the move, and the clock starts before the release. At 8:26 a.m. ET someone bought 16,950 hold contracts at 57 cents, four minutes before the number; at 8:28:56 someone else bought 6,421 hike contracts at 43. Then 8:30. In the first nine seconds after the release, four sell orders hit the hold at 55, 54, 54 and 53 for 35,000 contracts, and at 8:30:13 a print of 18,318 went through at 50, the hold's first trade at or below a coin flip since Thursday morning, before Waller. It printed its low of the day, 41, 16 seconds after the release, bounced to 45 at 8:30:22 and 43 at 8:30:29, and was sold back down to 41 at 8:31:34. On the hike rung the flow was the mirror: its first print at 50 or better came at 8:30:19, a buyer took 10,323 at 52 at 8:30:35, and the largest hike trade of the day, 20,369 contracts bought at 54, went through at 8:33:08, on the way to a 56-cent high in the same hour. Kalshi's hourly candle for 8 to 9 a.m. has the hold opening at 57 and closing at 46 on 346,000 contracts, and the hike opening at 43 and closing at 54 on 87,000. Those are the two morning numbers a reader should keep: a report three times consensus moved the favorite by about 11 cents and stopped.
Where it stopped is the second half of Friday's tape. From 9 a.m. on, the hold's buyers came back in size at one price. Blocks of 20,000 and 22,375 hold contracts were bought at 47 cents at 9:21 and 9:22 a.m., 32,570 at 47 at 9:27, 20,000 and 35,000 at 47 at 10:16 and 10:17, another 35,000 at 47 at 10:37, and 30,000 at 47 at 10:56; in the 10 o'clock hour, 167,000 of the 168,000 hold contracts that traded were buyers lifting the offer. Sellers worked the hike at the same time, sellers hitting the bid for most of the volume from 9 a.m. through 1 p.m., including a single 20,000-contract sale at 52 cents at 12:16 p.m., and the price did not break: it held 52 to 53 through the afternoon, buyers returned after 2 p.m., and it last printed 51 at 7:18 p.m. Since midnight ET the hold has traded 1.0 million contracts in a 41-to-57 range and the hike 285,000 in a 42-to-56 range. The 143,716 hold contracts bought at 44 cents at 9:41 a.m. on Monday, August 31, still the largest single print on either rung since August 27, are three cents in the money tonight; at Thursday's close they were 13. The market spent Friday deciding that Waller's bar for a hike is next Friday's inflation report, and that 162,000 jobs clears a different bar.
The week in one lineWaller made the hold the favorite on Thursday, the jobs report made the hike the favorite on Friday, and the September 11 inflation report is the one at least five of the 12 voters have tied their vote to.
What The Models Think
We also asked a panel of forecasting programs we grade in public the same question. Three of the panel's eight seats ran this board on Wednesday, August 26, two days before the Jackson Hole keynote, without seeing the price, only the sourced record. Two of the three, call them Seats 1 and 2, put the hold at 58% and 62%, under that day's 67-cent market, on arithmetic and history: the three July dissenters need four more votes in one meeting, and the Fed almost never raises rates into a month of falling payrolls. Seat 3 put the hold at 35%, meaning it had the hike ahead, on the PCE print, the "no soft inflation target" language and the two big banks openly calling for a September hike. The middle answer was 58%; the spread between the two camps was 27 points. One of the hold-leaning seats put it this way in the August 26 run: "Hold is the modal outcome — a September hike needs four converts beyond July's three dissenters right as payrolls turned negative and core CPI eased." Every seat named the Jackson Hole speech as the single event that could move its number the most.
Nine days later the market has been on both sides of the panel and is back between them. On Monday, August 31, the hold printed as low as 37 cents and it closed Tuesday at 38 to 39, three to four cents above Seat 3's 35%; on Thursday it closed at 56 to 57, a point under the lower of the two seats that said 58 and 62; on Friday evening it is 47 to 48, almost exactly halfway between the outlier and the pair. The hold-leaning seats' best argument, that the Fed does not raise rates into falling payrolls, was written when July's payroll number was a loss of 23,000; Friday's revision made it a gain of 21,000, so that sentence is now an argument about a month that did not happen the way the seats were told. The frozen numbers were not re-run for this update; the seats have not seen Jackson Hole, the tanker strikes, Waller or the jobs report. These are model estimates, not predictions of fact and not financial advice; the market has real money behind it and the panel has only the record.
The Sentence That Moved The Board
Warsh's keynote ran Friday, August 28, at 10:00 a.m. ET, and he gave no forward guidance about the September meeting at all. He did not have to. "We must be confident that underlying inflation is moving to our objective, clearly and at sufficient speed," he said. "Otherwise, we have work to do." He told the room the summer's better-than-expected inflation readings "do not tell me that underlying trends have meaningfully improved," called the inflation data "more concerning" than the labor trends, and said more than half of the goods and services the government tracks rose 3% or more over the past year, well above the pre-pandemic share, per the Associated Press; Bank of America's Aditya Bhave, recapping the speech, pinned the share Warsh cited at 54% of the PCE basket. "Labor markets are quite stable," he said, with unemployment at 4.1% "low by historical standards," per Kiplinger's account of the speech.
The market heard September anyway. Before the speech the hold was nearly 70 cents on Kalshi; by late morning the hike was 48, per CNBC's Davis Giangiulio, and by the close it was 46 to 47 after touching 54, on 1.16 million contracts, the busiest day for this contract in the daily candles we pulled, which start August 17. The August 26 edition of this page said one sentence making September live would push the hike through 40 cents. It went through 40 before lunch. What the page did not say is that it would keep going all weekend, or that two 8:30 a.m. releases the following week would each move the favorite by more than 10 cents in opposite directions.
Four Days Of Hike, One Day Of Hold, Then The Jobs Report
Kalshi closing prices by Eastern day, in cents, from the daily candle feed; Friday is the 7:19 p.m. ET quote:
| Day | Hike a quarter point | Hold | What landed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Thu, Aug 27 | 30 to 31 | 69 to 70 | Eve of Jackson Hole |
| Fri, Aug 28 | 46 to 47 (high 54) | 54 to 55 | Warsh: "we have work to do" |
| Sat, Aug 29 | 47 to 48 | 52 to 53 | Weekend drift |
| Sun, Aug 30 | 53 to 54 | 46 to 47 | Hike takes the lead Sunday evening |
| Mon, Aug 31 | 56 to 57 (high 62) | 41 to 42 (low 37) | FedWatch 66%; Bessent, Citi push back |
| Tue, Sep 1 | 61 to 62 | 38 to 39 | Tankers hit in Hormuz, Brent $92 |
| Wed, Sep 2 | 53 to 54 | 44 to 45 | ADP 38,000; Williams "wait and see" |
| Thu, Sep 3 | 42 to 43 (low 39) | 56 to 57 (high 59) | Waller: "give disinflation a chance" |
| Fri, Sep 4 | 51 to 52 (high 56) | 47 to 48 (low 41) | Payrolls 162,000 vs a 53,000 forecast |
The hike did not stop at a coin flip. It closed Sunday at 54 and Monday, August 31, at 56 after trading as high as 62, the day CME FedWatch put a September move at 66.1%, "nearly double where they were before Warsh spoke," per CNBC's Jeff Cox. Bank of America's Bhave, in a note quoted by Morningstar's Tom Lauricella, wrote that "the onus is now on him to deliver a hike in Sep (unless the Aug jobs and inflation data are very soft). Else he will probably lose the credibility he gained today. We have long called for a Sep hike." CNBC reported the bank was holding its call for three increases. The doubters were on the record the same day. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNBC from the G20 that "traditionally you don't raise into a supply shock unless you see second- or third-order effects," and Citigroup's Andrew Hollenhorst wrote: "There will not be a consensus to hike rates in September." JPMorgan Asset Management's David Kelly called the 60% pricing "premature." Goldman's Jan Hatzius, in the same Morningstar roundup, said a hike "is possible if the August CPI and PPI come in firmer, but we continue to expect that core CPI and PCE inflation will print around 0.2% in August and that the FOMC will remain on hold." Rich Clarida of PIMCO said the August CPI "may well determine whether a majority of the 12 voting members" have seen enough.
Tuesday, September 1, was the hike's best day, and the reason was oil. A Saudi Arabian and a South Korean oil tanker were hit by projectiles within minutes of each other in the Strait of Hormuz on Monday night, a day after U.S. strikes on Iranian troops on Larak Island and Iranian retaliation against U.S. bases in Jordan, and Brent rose 2% to $92 a barrel on Tuesday, per UPI. The ISM manufacturing prices index held at 71.1, a 23rd straight month of rising input prices, per the Institute's release. The same day, Governor Michael Barr set out a two-sided test in a Washington speech: "If trends in the data give me some confidence that inflation is moderating on a path to 2 percent, then I think we can take a bit more time to assess our policy stance. However, if inflation appears not to be moderating sufficiently, then I think we should act decisively to raise rates," per the text on the Fed's website. The hike closed Tuesday at 61 cents. The hold, nearly 70 cents before Warsh spoke, closed Tuesday at 38 to 39 after printing 37 on Monday.
Wednesday is where the turn started, and it started with jobs rather than prices. ADP said private employers added 38,000 workers in August, the fewest since January, against a 47,000 estimate; manufacturing lost 17,000 and professional services 16,000, per CNBC. Tuesday's JOLTS report had already come in at about 7.2 million job openings for July, short of forecasts, per Zacks on Yahoo Finance. New York Fed President John Williams said Wednesday that policymakers needed to "wait and see," and that there were "no clear signs right now" whether current policy is enough to bring inflation back to target, per AFP on Yahoo Finance. The hike opened Wednesday at 61, traded down to 53 and closed at 54. Then Waller spoke.
His case is specific, and it matters for reading Friday. At 8:30 a.m. ET Thursday, in remarks to a Reuters NEXT audience in Washington, Waller said "recent data suggest we are finally seeing some signs of disinflation," and that "if this continues in the data due over the next two weeks, I would be inclined to support holding the target for the federal funds rate at its current setting," per the text of his remarks on the Fed's website; his own summary, per CNBC's Jeff Cox, was "I'm going to paraphrase John Lennon here: Give disinflation a chance. We can wait one meeting." Three-month core PCE inflation "has fallen steadily from 4.76 percent in February" to 3.05% for the three months through July, "a considerable improvement," and imputed nonmarket services prices "accounted for approximately half of the increase in core prices" in the last report, so "underlying inflation is doing better than the core numbers suggest." On energy, the thing that has held the hike up all summer: "my earlier worry that higher energy prices would bleed into many goods and services prices hasn't come to pass, at least so far." On the labor market: "Job creation, though a bit volatile, has increased this year by an average of 60,000 a month through July," and he expected "more of the same" from Friday's report, adding that the labor market, being in "satisfactory shape," is "not a large factor" in how he sets policy right now compared with inflation. He was careful to leave the door open. "I judge that policy is currently only slightly restricting aggregate demand, and it may not take much acceleration in inflation to nudge me into supporting tighter policy." AFP's count after his remarks: at least five of the 12 voters have said they are ready to raise rates if August inflation does not cooperate, and Waller is now one of them, on a condition. The hold traded 1.88 million contracts Thursday, its busiest session in the daily candles we pulled, and closed at 56 to 57.
Friday's report ran well past "more of the same": 162,000 against Waller's 60,000-a-month average, with the summer's one negative month revised away. And the price that came out of it, hike 51 to 52, says the market took him at his word about which report decides his vote: payrolls moved the crowd back across the coin flip and no further, because the sentence that matters is "my decision on the appropriate stance of policy will be heavily influenced by what we learn about August inflation," and that number lands September 11.
Grading The Hike Call
This page has leaned hike since August 26, when the hike was 32 to 33 cents at that edition's 5:30 p.m. read (it closed that day at 30 to 31) and the headline above was written. Nine days on, the scorecard has four lines. The direction was right: the hike went from 33 to a 62-cent high, and the specific call that a live-September sentence at Jackson Hole would carry it through 40 cents was right: the hike cleared 40 before lunch and was 48 by late morning, per CNBC. The size was underestimated: the page said "through 40," the market went through 60. The page missed the mechanism that gave half of it back: it treated Jackson Hole as the last word before the vote, and Waller's remarks are a reminder that the chair speaks first and the governors speak last, and that a 9-3 committee is nine people, not three. And the Thursday edition of this page, written at the 12:20 p.m. snapshot with the hike at 43, said the headline "should be read as a record of when it was" the favorite. That lasted 20 hours. At 51 to 52 cents the headline is the market's position again, by four cents rather than Tuesday's 22, for a committee that has not raised rates in more than three years, and with one report left that at least five of the 12 voters have said is the one that counts. The panel's hold-leaning seats, at 58% and 62%, have now been above the market on the hold at every close since Jackson Hole, Thursday's 57 included, and Friday took away the payroll argument they were built on.
How A Cut Died In July And A Hike Came Back In August
The cut was never priced this summer because the argument inside the building runs the other way. The July statement said inflation "remains elevated relative to the Committee's 2 percent goal, in part reflecting supply shocks that have driven price increases in certain sectors, including energy." Hammack, in her explanation of the dissent, said "now is the time for the [Federal Open Market Committee] to act to speed the return of PCE inflation to our 2 percent objective," and Kashkari argued that "a potential series of small policy moves would be better than waiting," per Quartz on July 31. Warsh, asked at the press conference whether the Fed's target had quietly drifted higher, answered: "There is no soft inflation target; there is no soft implicit target—not on this Committee's watch. There's only a target, and it's 2 percent."
Then the data went soft, and the hike went with it. The July jobs report, released August 7, showed payrolls falling by 23,000; the futures-based chance of a hold jumped from 45% to 56% in a day, and Indeed's Cory Stahle told CBS News "the chances of holding just went up pretty significantly today," per CBS on August 7. The August 12 CPI report was cool, with prices up 0.1% on the month and core inflation down to 2.5% over the year, and the hike opened the following Monday, August 17, at 26 cents and printed as low as 24 that day. That is the day Goldman Sachs argued the hawks had lost the room: "After two months of materially softer jobs and inflation data, it's hard to see any of the doves shifting toward hikes," Hatzius wrote, calling market pricing "too hawkish," per Yahoo Finance. Goldman's call is no move for the rest of 2026; the full 2026 rate-cut count is priced the same way. The money did not follow Goldman: the hike closed August 17 at 28 to 29 and was 32 to 33 by the Friday, August 21 close, before a single new inflation or jobs print. Friday's revision is the footnote to that whole month: the 23,000-job loss that started the hold's run in August was, on the bureau's second look, a 21,000-job gain.
The other side never went away. J.P. Morgan Wealth Management flipped to expecting a September hike on August 5; its chief investment strategist Phil Camporeale wrote that supply chains "around the Strait of Hormuz" and "market questioning of inflation-fighting credibility after the July FOMC meeting has lowered the bar for a rate hike in September," per Chase. Bank of America told CBS it was "sticking with our call that the Fed will hike by [0.75 percentage points] this year, starting in September." Then came the minutes on August 19, with "several participants" having favored a hike in July itself, and the August 26 PCE print, which left core PCE 1.3 points above the 2 percent target; the hike traded 30 to 36 that day and closed at 30 to 31, which is where Warsh found it at 10:00 a.m. on the 28th. The arithmetic is the market's: four more votes turn three dissenters into a majority of seven. Which is why a 1-cent cut and a 51-cent hike can sit on the same board without contradiction. The only dissents on this page's record this year came from the hawkish side, so the committee's whole distribution of likely outcomes starts at the current range and runs upward; the doves have no votes on record, only data, and Friday took some of the data. For the wider backdrop, the recession board is where the doves' case would show up first.
Where The Cut Question Lives Now: October, At 4 Cents
If September's cut is a penny, the honest version of the search query is when a cut's bid stops being zero, and Kalshi's answer is the next meeting, barely. The committee meets again October 27-28, per the Fed's calendar, and Kalshi's October decision market, which settles on that meeting's announcement, prices a quarter-point cut at 3 cents bid, 4 ask, and a bigger cut at 1 to 2, against a hold at 68 to 69 and a quarter-point hike at 26 to 27. Read against September, the October board says two things. The market thinks the cut argument is three to four times likelier to win in October than in September, and it thinks a hike is a real possibility at both meetings: 51 to 52 now, 26 to 27 for the meeting after, with the exchange's rate ladder for the end of October agreeing, thinly, at 59 to 61 cents that the rate will be above 3.75% by then, on a rung that traded nine contracts in the last 24 hours. December, the last meeting of the year on December 8-9, is the first board where a cut asks more than a nickel, 4 cents bid against a 7-cent ask, with a hold at 49 to 50 and a quarter-point hike at 38 to 43.
Volume tells you how seriously to take the October number. The September cut contract has traded 6.3 million contracts since it listed; the October cut has traded 262,000, about 17,000 of them in the last 24 hours, and on Friday the whole day's tape on it was 14,444 contracts across 93 trades, all at 3 or 4 cents, and nearly all of them buyers. It is a thin market being nudged by people willing to pay four cents for a dollar if the committee does in October what it would not do in September, and the jobs report did not move it: 4 cents before, a few prints at 3 in the hour after, 4 cents by the afternoon. The October hold, at 68 to 69, traded 306 contracts on Friday. For anyone who came to this page asking about a cut, that is the state of the question: no bid in September, a four-cent ask in October, a seven-cent ask in December, and a hike priced above every one of them at every meeting left this year.
The Chair, The Phone Calls, And The 'Political Board'
Warsh is a named person in this market, and his summer has had a controversy in it; the tape has priced it at nothing. Since the letter described below went out on August 19, the hike rung has gone from the high 20s to a 62-cent high and sits at 51, so whatever traders are pricing, it is not the president's stated preference. On August 19, Senators Chris Van Hollen, Jack Reed, Angela Alsobrooks and Elizabeth Warren wrote to him asking that he disclose his conversations with President Trump since taking office in May. The Wall Street Journal had reported that the two had "spoken repeatedly," and Warsh's public calendar for his first full month listed calls with lawmakers, White House officials and private-sector economists, but no entry for the president, per Bloomberg's report in the Spokesman-Review. The letter: "It is critical that the Fed be transparent about these discussions to demonstrate its independence from the White House, a norm that you have said you intend to uphold." The senators asked him either to confirm in writing that there had been no contact or to amend the calendars; a Fed spokesperson said the practice of releasing calendars a month in arrears has not changed, and Warsh, pressed by Van Hollen at a hearing, "did not directly answer questions on the matter," per investinglive on August 19. Trump himself said on August 10 that he had spoken to Warsh once, briefly. Warren had called Warsh a "sock puppet" for Trump at his confirmation hearing; he was confirmed as chair 54 to 45, per Al Jazeera.
The president's own position is public and points the other way from the hike. At the White House on August 19, Trump called rates "ridiculous" and said of the committee: "The problem is he has a board, and it's a political board." Of the members, "people put in by Obama, Biden, and me," he said, "they vote to raise interest rates. I don't know if they're doing it because they think they're doing a good thing or because they like the politics of it," per Mortgage Professional America, which noted the Fed has not actually raised rates in more than three years. He exempted Warsh, who he said is doing a "great job." That is the price of a September hike in political terms: it would be the first increase of Trump's second term, seven weeks before the midterms, signed by his own appointee. Two weeks ago the market watched the same story and moved the hike up. This week the president's own Treasury secretary made the supply-shock case against a hike out loud on Monday, the same day the largest single trade of the week, 143,716 hold contracts at 44 cents, went through at 9:41 a.m. ET, with the hike at 54 to 55 and its 62-cent high still two and a half hours away. The tape records the trade; it does not record whether the buyer was listening to Bessent or to the payroll revisions, and Friday's revisions ran against him.
More on this: Kalshi Fed Odds: Trump's Own Pick Might Hike On Him · Fed Rate Cut Odds: A Hike Is Priced Higher At Every Meeting · Traders Are Betting On A Quiet Fed. The Machines Are Not So Sure · Recession Odds On Kalshi: 2026 Vs 2027, And Why They Differ · How Kalshi's 'Number Of Rate Cuts' Market Counts A Cut
What Moves The Price From Here
Three dates decide this now, and the first is already in. Friday's August jobs report at 8:30 a.m. ET printed 162,000 against a Dow Jones consensus of 53,000, with unemployment at 4.1% and the June and July revisions adding 55,000 more, per the BLS. The previous edition of this page said a payroll number near zero would push the hike toward the 30s but would not by itself decide Waller's vote; the mirror image is what happened. A number three times consensus pushed the hike from 42-43 to 51-52, and on Waller's own framework it does not by itself decide his vote either. Bank of America, which still calls a September hike, had said payrolls "are unlikely to be the deciding factor," and the market priced it that way: a 10-cent move, not a 20-cent one.
The two reports left are the August producer and consumer price indexes, at 8:30 a.m. ET on Thursday, September 10 and Friday, September 11, with the CPI on Friday per the BLS release calendar and the PPI the day before, per CNBC's Cox. This is the vote. Waller has said August inflation is what his decision will turn on, and Barr's version, quoted above, is that insufficient moderation means acting decisively. The three precedents on this page's own tape set the scale: one hawkish sentence at Jackson Hole moved the hike from 30 cents to 54 in three hours on August 28, one negative jobs print on August 7 moved it 22 cents the other way, from near 57 to 35 in the daily record the August 26 edition of this page kept, and one 162,000 print on Friday moved the hike rung about 10. A hot core print on the 11th could put the hike back through 60 the same morning; Jackson Hole moved it 24 cents in three hours, and that was a speech, not a data release. A 0.2% print with Waller's 3.05% three-month trend intact is the hold's case made in numbers, and the market will have five days to price it before the committee sits down. Goldman expects core around 0.2% and a hold; BofA expects a hike unless the data are "very soft." The producer price index the day before feeds the PCE figure the committee actually targets.
Then Wednesday, September 16, at 2:00 p.m. ET, the decision. Twelve votes. Three are on record for a hike from July, and at least five voters have now said publicly that a hot August print would move them. The contract on this page settles on the range announced that afternoon, and the October and December boards above will reprice on the same sentence.
Hero illustration: OddsShopper, in the house collage style. Marriner S. Eccles Federal Reserve Board Building photo by AgnosticPreachersKid, licensed CC BY-SA 3.0; photos cropped, toned, and composited. The hero's chart shows the August 26 board.
Prices quoted are live Kalshi market prices as of Friday, September 4, 2026, 7:19 p.m. ET, and will keep moving until this market settles after the Wednesday, September 16, 2026 vote. OddsShopper covers prediction markets as an independent analyst: any model or panel figures referenced are model estimates, not predictions of fact and not financial advice. This article does not advocate for or against any candidate or party. Trading involves risk; contracts can go to zero.
