As of 8:55 p.m. ET on Friday, September 11, 2026, Kalshi prices a quarter-point Fed rate hike at the September 16 meeting at 78 cents bid, 80 ask. "Fed maintains rate" is 21 bid, 22 ask, and both cut legs show zero bid and a penny ask. The Bureau of Labor Statistics put the August consumer price index on the wire at 8:30 a.m., and the headline did what the Dow Jones consensus said it would: all items up 0.4% on the month and 3.4% on the year (BLS), a tenth above the 3.3% FactSet consensus CBS News cites. The line under it is the one that moved the board. Core prices, excluding food and energy, rose 0.3%, a tenth above the forecast and up from 0.2% in July. The hike's last print before the release was 58 cents, at 8:29:39. At 8:30:40 it printed 85, the highest print in this page's record, and the hold, which had printed 41 two seconds before the number, printed 8 cents at 8:30:32 on an order of 8,538 contracts. (On Kalshi a price in cents is a probability; the bid is what buyers will pay and the ask is what sellers want.) Thursday morning, when this page was last written, the hike had just moved to two-in-three on the producer print. It is now about four-in-five, and there is no scheduled inflation number left between here and the vote.
What the market read is the split the report itself draws. Gasoline rose 3.9% in August and, in the BLS's words, accounted "for over one third of the monthly all items increase"; the energy index rose 2.1% on the month and is up 16.3% on the year, with gasoline up 27.4% and fuel oil up 52% over 12 months, per CNBC. That part everyone expected. The part that took the hold from 41 to the teens was outside energy: shelter rose 0.3% after 0.1% in July, airline fares rose 2.7% on the month and 23.4% on the year, and used cars and trucks rose 0.4% (BLS). The doves got one number, and it was the one that matters least to this committee's stated test: the 12-month core rate came in at 2.4%, matching the estimate and down from 2.5% in July, per CBS News. Nationwide's chief economist Kathy Bostjancic put the market's reading in a sentence: "Chair Warsh and others signaled that interest rates can remain on hold only if disinflation continues and today's August report did not deliver that," and Nationwide now expects a quarter-point hike next week (CNBC). Waller's September 3 condition was written for exactly this print: whether the August data would show the summer's improvement "has been fleeting." A core print of 0.3% after 0.2% in July is that sentence with a number in it.
The other thing that happened is that the hold's buyers spent the night before the release doing what they did all week, and lost more than they ever had. Between Thursday's 9:07 a.m. board and the 8:30 release about 2.1 million contracts traded on the hold, 1.8 million of them buyers crossing the spread, and they walked it from 35 to a first print of 44 at 7:52 a.m. Friday while the hike slipped from 65 to 57. The board went into the number 58 to 41, six cents friendlier to the hold than it had been on Thursday morning. Forty seconds later it was 85 to 8. By the 4 p.m. print the hike was 80 and the hold was 20, and the day's shape was set: the hike's sellers met it at 81 with the largest single order this page has recorded, and the hold's buyers put more than four and a half million contracts, almost all of it after 9:30 a.m., into a contract that did not print above 22 after 9:30.
The jobs report re-priced this board in 19 seconds. The producer print took 13 minutes. Friday's number took 40 seconds, went further than either, and left a board with nothing scheduled to move it but the vote. The 40 seconds, the 97,040-contract sale, the 432,000 contracts that went into the hold at 18 and 19 in 13 orders over lunch, and the December board that finally moved are below.
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How The Dove Got A Hawk's Committee
Warsh's path to the chair ran through a 13-11 Banking Committee vote, with Elizabeth Warren criticizing him as a "sock puppet" for the White House, then 54-45 on the floor in May (CNBC). He arrived with a mandate everyone understood: the president who picked him had said on television that a rate-hiker would not have gotten the job.
Then the economy declined to cooperate. The Iran war pushed oil past $100 and headline inflation above 4%; July's consumer price reading cooled to 3.4%, still well above target, while July payrolls were first reported as a loss of 23,000. At the July 29 meeting Warsh held rates steady, and the vote carried a signal the Fed has not sent since September 2016: three voting members dissented in the same direction, and the direction was up. Cleveland's Beth Hammack, Minneapolis's Neel Kashkari, and Dallas's Lorie Logan all voted to hike. CNBC's postmortem caught the tension in one line: markets heard a dovish Warsh, but "his own words suggest a rate hike." The July meeting minutes, released August 19, put it in committee language: "many" participants saw a hike as "likely necessary if inflation did not decline."
The market backdrop turned hostile at the same moment. A mid-August global bond rout pushed the 30-year Treasury near 5.23%, with economist Diane Swonk describing the Fed's predicament as a "credibility problem." And on August 20 the politics escalated: Senate Democrats opened an investigation into White House pressure on the chairman, demanding logs of Trump's calls with Warsh, an inquiry into whether the man Warren accused of being a "sock puppet" at confirmation is being worked like one.
What Jackson Hole Started, And What Waller Undid
Warsh's first Jackson Hole keynote on August 28 never committed to a hike out loud. What he offered was a hawk's arithmetic wrapped in a refusal to pre-commit: this summer's inflation readings "do not tell me that underlying trends have meaningfully improved," and "we must be confident that underlying inflation is moving to our objective, clearly and at sufficient speed. Otherwise, we have work to do." The September hike contract went from 30 cents before the speech to a 54-cent high the same day, and by Monday, August 31, the fed funds futures market had the probability of a quarter-point move at 66.1%, "nearly double where they were before Warsh spoke," per CNBC's Monday report. The supply shock did the rest. The hike contract first touched 62 cents, its high at the time, on Monday, August 31, and U.S. strikes on Iranian targets around the Strait of Hormuz on Tuesday, September 1 (CNBC) kept crude above $90 and the contract near that high through Wednesday morning.
On Monday, August 31, the argument for the other side came from the G20 summit by the president's own Treasury Secretary. Scott Bessent told CNBC: "It is my belief that we've seen a supply shock, and traditionally you don't raise into a supply shock unless you see second- or third-order effects. And we are seeing the core inflation has remained very, very restrained." For two days the market ignored him. The hike contract had already slipped from its 62-cent high to 54 by Wednesday's close, and then Waller gave Bessent's argument a vote on the committee.
Waller's remarks on Thursday, September 3, in a Reuters NEXT interview in Washington, were built around one test, and he named the report. If the next two weeks of data keep showing progress on inflation, "I would be inclined to support holding the target for the federal funds rate at its current setting" (Federal Reserve). "If the incoming data for August show this improvement has been fleeting, then it may be appropriate to raise the policy rate when the FOMC meets on September 15 and 16," he said, before the sentence that moved the board: "So my decision on the appropriate stance of policy will be heavily influenced by what we learn about August inflation." He was explicit that the door stays open: it "may not take much acceleration in inflation to nudge me into supporting" a hike, and "if it reverses, then you know it's time to pull the trigger and hike rates," per the Associated Press's Christopher Rugaber (AP). In the ten minutes after his remarks crossed on Thursday morning, the "Fed maintains rate" contract went from 47 cents to 54, roughly $452,000 of face value changed hands, and the hike went the other way; CME FedWatch's September hike probability fell about 12 points to 54.6% in the minutes after he spoke, per 24/7 Wall St.. By Thursday's close the hold was 53 to 54, and buyers kept lifting it overnight, to 56 and 57 by midnight, with no Fed voice on the tape at all. That was the board at 4:40 a.m. on Friday, September 4: a market leaning into the hold ahead of the data. The data did not cooperate with that either.
Nineteen Seconds After 8:30, On September 4
On Friday, September 4, the last print on the hold before the jobs release was 57 cents, at 8:29:46 a.m. ET. The last print on the hike was 43, one second earlier. Here is what the Kalshi tape shows after that, with times in Eastern and sizes in contracts, each worth one dollar at settlement.
At 8:30:01 the first hold contracts sold at 56. At 8:30:13 the hold printed 50; at 8:30:19 the hike printed 50. Nineteen seconds after the number, the two contracts that had been 14 cents apart were level. The hold's low of the day, 41, printed at 8:30:16, and the 8:30 minute alone put 113,679 contracts through the hold, well over half of the roughly 183,000 that the entire overnight session had needed to walk it up to 57. The hike ran to 53 by the end of that minute and took its biggest single order of the day at 8:33:08: one sweep of 32,512 contracts across 16 fills at 54 and 55, the largest of them 20,369 contracts at 54. The hike's high of the day, 56, printed at 8:34:16. Four minutes, start to finish, and the September Fed decision had a new favorite.
Then the day got interesting, because the flow spent the next ten hours arguing with the price and the price won. From 8:37 a.m. onward the hold's tape is a sequence of very large buy orders: 30,000 contracts at 45 at 8:37:13, 25,505 at 44 at 8:46:51, then 30,000 at 47 at 9:22:42, 32,570 at 47 at 9:27:52, 35,000 at 47 at 10:17:29, 35,000 at 47 at 10:37:22, and 35,000 at 47 at 10:56:52. That is 167,570 contracts bought at exactly 47 cents in the 95 minutes between 9:22 and 10:57, and the 10 a.m. hour put about 167,600 contracts through the hold, essentially all of them buyers crossing the spread. Buyers were defending the hold with real money, and the price did not move: 47 at 9:22, 47 at 10:56, 47 to 48 at the close. The hike's tape is the mirror image. From 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. the crossing orders on the hike were overwhelmingly sellers, including a single 20,000-contract sale at 52 at 12:16:11 p.m., and the hike did not print below 52 in any of those hours. Sellers leaned on it for five hours and it did not give a cent; only a thin evening leaked it to 51.
From the 4:40 a.m. snapshot to the evening board that Friday, about 944,000 contracts traded on the hold, roughly 721,000 of them buyers crossing the spread, against 224,000 sellers; the hike traded about 278,000, split almost evenly, 138,000 buyers to 140,000 sellers. Read those two lines together and the day's shape is clear: the 8:30 sweep set the new prices, the resting orders re-priced with it, and every attempt to buy the hold back to where it was on Thursday found a seller at 47. The evening confirmed it. At 6:46:20 p.m. a buyer swept 18,189 contracts across 17 fills at 52 and 53 on the hike, the 6 p.m. hour's crossing orders were buyers on 19,983 of 20,329 contracts, and the last prints on the tape, pulled five minutes after the board at 7:23 p.m., were 51 on the hike and 48 on the hold. That was the board this page carried into the weekend, and the weekend turned it into a coin flip.
Five Days In The Dark, And The Week's Biggest Hour
The hike did not hold 51. Sellers leaned on it through Friday night and it printed 49 at 11:45 p.m.; the hold's buyers kept lifting the offer and it printed 49 by Saturday morning. For the whole of Saturday and Sunday the two contracts sat within a cent or two of each other, the hike 49 to 51 and the hold 47 to 50, on real size: about 284,000 contracts on the hold Saturday, three-quarters of them buyers, and 390,000 Sunday, three-fifths buyers. Sunday afternoon's 4 p.m. hour alone put 106,000 contracts through the hold, all but 6,000 of them buyers, including one order of 64,693 contracts at 49 at 4:45 p.m. That is what the market looked like with no data and no Fed: a coin flip that the hold's buyers were paying up to keep.
Oil broke the tie. Brent climbed toward $97 on Monday, up about 9% in five days, after U.S. strikes on three Iranian tankers over the weekend and, on Monday, a second hit on Saudi Aramco's Jizan facilities, with an average of ten commodity ships a day crossing the Strait of Hormuz over the prior ten days per Kpler (Al Jazeera). The hike printed 53 for the first time since the evening of the jobs report at 3:39 p.m. Monday, and the 8 p.m. hour that evening put 36,000 contracts through it, 33,000 of them buyers. Tuesday night Brent reached $99.05 in extended trading on a Wall Street Journal report that Iran had launched a second, previously undisclosed attack on U.S. Navy ships (CNBC); the hike printed 54 by the close and 55 that evening. On Wednesday Brent settled at $101.21, its highest close since May, the 10-year Treasury yield touched 4.845%, its highest since November 2023, and the 2-year rose to 4.436% (CNBC). Wednesday was the biggest day this page has recorded on the hike, about 646,000 contracts with 406,000 of them buyers, and the hold's biggest since the jobs report, 886,000 contracts with 751,000 buyers. The hold's 10 a.m. hour alone did 290,593 contracts, 269,801 of them buyers crossing the spread at 44 and 45, 1.7 times the 167,600-contract hour that defended 47 on September 4. Starting at 1:40:52 p.m. two orders of 54,675 and 77,035 contracts bought the hold at 44 within 21 seconds of each other. At 4:01 p.m. the other side answered: one sweep of 48,736 contracts bought the hike at 56 and another of 26,158 bought it at 57 a minute later, in an hour in which buyers took 160,241 of the 160,664 hike contracts that traded.
Here is the walk, in last prints at 4 p.m. ET each day, from the tape this page pulls.
| Last Print, 4 P.m. ET | Hike 25bps | Fed Maintains Rate |
|---|---|---|
| Fri., Sept. 4 (7:18 P.m. Board) | 51/52¢ bid/ask | 47/48¢ bid/ask |
| Sat., Sept. 5 | 50¢ | 49¢ |
| Sun., Sept. 6 | 50¢ | 49¢ |
| Mon., Sept. 7 | 52¢ | 48¢ |
| Tue., Sept. 8 | 54¢ | 45¢ |
| Wed., Sept. 9 | 56¢ | 44¢ |
| Thu., Sept. 10, Last Print Before 8:30 A.m. | 56¢ | 46¢ |
| Thu., Sept. 10, 9:07 A.m. Board | 64/65¢ bid/ask | 34/35¢ bid/ask |
Wednesday's row is the one to read against the buy-side totals behind it. The hold's buyers put up about 208,000 contracts Saturday, 232,000 Sunday, 328,000 Monday, 375,000 Tuesday and 751,000 Wednesday, each day more than the last, and the 4 p.m. print went 49, 49, 48, 45, 44. On September 4 this page said 167,570 contracts bought at exactly 47 in 95 minutes was what a defended price looked like: buyers crossed at 47, resting sellers met them, and the price stayed put. This week showed the other half of that lesson: with Brent adding a dollar or two a day, the same pattern of buying bought a lower price each day. Thursday morning, before the release, the hold had bounced back to 46 and the hike had slipped to 53 briefly at 7 a.m. before recovering to 56 at 8:27, so the board went into the 8:30 print a cent or two friendlier to the hold than Wednesday's close. Then the report came out.
Thirteen Minutes After 8:30, On September 10
The first two orders on the hold after the release were buyers. At 8:30:25 and again at 8:30:45, 20 seconds apart, someone bought 20,000 contracts at 46, which is what you do if you read a 0.4% headline that matched the consensus and stop reading. At 8:31:19 a seller crossed with 30,000 contracts at 45, and the walk down began. Here is the tape, first print at each price, with the heaviest minutes noted.
| Time (ET), Thursday, Sept. 10 | Hike 25bps | Fed Maintains Rate |
|---|---|---|
| Last Print Before 8:30 | 56¢ (8:27:18) | 46¢ (8:29:51) |
| 8:30 | 55¢, 935 contracts sold (8:30:29) | two 20,000-contract buys at 46¢ |
| 8:31 | 56¢, a 7,232-contract buy (8:31:55) | 30,000 sold at 45¢; first 44¢ (8:31:32) |
| 8:32 | first 43¢ (8:32:28) | |
| 8:33 To 8:34 | first 57¢ (8:33:09); 9,760 bought at 57¢; first 58¢ (8:34:45) | |
| 8:35 To 8:36 | first 59¢ (8:36:28) | first 42¢ (8:35:49), 41¢ and 40¢ (8:36:17) |
| 8:38 To 8:39 | first 60¢ (8:38:47), 61¢ (8:39:58) | first 39¢ (8:38:52), 38¢ (8:39:08) |
| 8:40 | first 37¢ (8:40:50) | |
| 8:41 | one sweep prints 62¢, 63¢ and 64¢ (8:41:40) | |
| 8:42 To 8:43 | first 65¢ (8:43:19) | first 36¢ and 35¢ (8:42:38) |
| 8:45 | 57,794 contracts, nearly all sellers, at 36¢ and 37¢ | |
| 9:07 Board | 64/65¢ bid/ask | 34/35¢ bid/ask |
The hold's heaviest minute was 8:45, after the price had already found 35: 57,794 contracts, essentially all sellers, including one order of 20,852 at 36 and another of 20,000 at 37. By 9:07 about 260,000 contracts had traded on the hold since the release, roughly 189,000 of them sellers crossing the spread, and the two 20,000-contract buyers at 46 were 11 cents under water. The hike's side ran the other way: about 111,000 contracts between the release and 9:07, buyers on roughly 97,000 of them, and the two largest orders after the opening minutes, 7,858 and 9,121 contracts, both paid 64.
The jobs report re-priced this board in 19 seconds. The PPI took 13 minutes, and the difference is the report. A 162,000 payroll against a 53,000 consensus is a number nobody has to interpret. A 0.4% headline that matched the consensus is one everybody had to read past, and the market spent those minutes reading: the hold gave nine of its 11 cents before 8:41, and the 8:41 sweep that took the hike from 61 to 64 in one second was the moment the hike's buyers stopped waiting. What the market read is the split described at the top of this page: goods, not services, and diesel, the fuel that moves freight, up nearly a quarter in a month. The soft core print was on the same page, and the market priced it at nothing, because this committee's test, in the words of the last voter to speak before the blackout, is what "we learn about August inflation," not what we learn about August inflation excluding the part that went up.
The Night Before: 1.8 Million Contracts Of Buying
The hold's buyers did not wait for the number. At 9:13:31 a.m. Thursday, six minutes after the board this page carried, two orders of 30,017 and 44,869 contracts bought the hold at 36. The 10 a.m. hour put 365,511 contracts through it, 332,453 of them buyers, and between 10:47 and 10:51 five orders of between 25,653 and 35,000 contracts bought at 37, followed by 48,459 more at 37 at 11:52. That is the same shape as the 35,000-contract orders that defended 47 on September 4 and the 751,000 contracts that bought 43 to 46 on Wednesday, with the price 10 cents lower again. The 4 p.m. print Thursday was 65 on the hike and 35 on the hold, the morning board to the cent, so the day's buying had bought nothing. Then the overnight session did what the daytime could not. At 12:51 a.m. Friday one order of 74,959 contracts bought the hold at 38, and the same sweep printed the first 39, 40 and 41 since Thursday morning's fall through them; 32,132 more were bought at 39 at 3:53 a.m.; and at 7:52:02 a 25,000-contract buy at 41 printed 42, 43 and 44 in the same second. The hike's tape ran the other way in smaller size: 64 at 9:08 Thursday, 62 by 9:40, 61 at 10:01 p.m., 60 at 3:59 a.m., 58 at 7:54 and 57 at 7:55, its low of the window. The last sizable order before the release was a buyer: 43,543 contracts on the hike at 60 at 8:20:18, ten minutes before the number. From Thursday's board to the release the hold traded about 2.1 million contracts with 1.82 million buyers, and the hike about 502,000 with 314,000 sellers. The last prints before 8:30 were 58 on the hike, at 8:29:39, and 41 on the hold, at 8:29:58.
Forty Seconds After 8:30
Here is the Kalshi tape after that, times in Eastern, sizes in contracts, each worth one dollar at settlement.
| Time (ET), Friday, Sept. 11 | Hike 25bps | Fed Maintains Rate |
|---|---|---|
| Last Print Before 8:30 | 58¢ (8:29:39) | 41¢ (8:29:58) |
| 8:30:01 | 60¢ | 40¢ |
| 8:30:03 | 64¢, fills of 1,651, 2,416 and 4,048 contracts | 35¢ through 39¢ in one sweep; first 34¢ |
| 8:30:09 To 8:30:10 | first 70¢, a 6,314-contract fill | first 30¢ |
| 8:30:13 | first 75¢ | |
| 8:30:19 | one sweep prints 29¢ down to 9¢, including 7,777 contracts at 10¢ | |
| 8:30:31 | first 80¢ through 83¢ | |
| 8:30:32 | 8¢ on 8,538 contracts, 9¢ on 9,469 | |
| 8:30:36 To 8:30:40 | a 6,022-contract fill at 83¢, then 13,005 at 83¢, first 85¢ (8:30:40) | |
| 8:30:53 | 74¢ bought, 72¢ sold | 12¢ and 13¢, buyers |
| 8:32 | 69,904 contracts bought at 19¢ to 22¢ | |
| 8:34 | 135,211 contracts, 108,948 of them buyers; 30,055 and 16,676 bought at 80¢, 18,985 and 19,330 at 81¢ | 60,702 bought, 19¢ to 21¢ |
| 8:37:40 | 97,040 contracts sold at 81¢ | |
| 8:45 To 8:48 | three 20,000-contract sales at 78¢ | |
| 8:52 To 8:53 | 35,821 and 32,544 bought at 21¢ | |
| 9:02 To 9:03 | 50,000 bought at 80¢ (9:02:34); 50,000 sold at 80¢ (9:03:42) | |
| 9:13:15 | one sweep buys 73,097 at 82¢ | |
| 9:19:34 | one sweep sells 88,000 at 17¢, 18¢ and 19¢ | |
| 4 P.m. Last Print | 80¢ | 20¢ |
| 8:55 P.m. Board | 78/80¢ bid/ask | 21/22¢ bid/ask |
The first minute is the whole repricing, and both contracts overshot it. The hike went from 58 to 85 in 40 seconds and was back to 72 by 8:30:53; the hold went from 41 to 8 in 32 seconds and had buyers at 12 and 13 20 seconds later. The 8:30:19 sweep on the hold, which printed from 29 down to 9 in one order, and the 8:30:32 prints at 8 and 9 cents, are a book with no resting bids left in it, not a market opinion, and the 8:32 minute proved it: 69,904 contracts bought back between 19 and 22 in 60 seconds. What the next hour settled is where the two sides would meet, and the answer was 80 and 20. The hike's heaviest minute was 8:34, 135,211 contracts with buyers on 108,948 of them, four orders of 16,676 to 30,055 at 80 and 81. Three minutes later a single seller answered with 97,040 contracts at 81, the largest order on either contract in this page's record, bigger than the 77,035-contract hold buy on Wednesday and the 64,693 on the Sunday before. Three sales of 20,000 at 78 followed between 8:45 and 8:48, and the rest of the morning was the two sides trading 50,000-contract blocks at 80 a minute apart. The 9:13 sweep of 73,097 bought at 82 was the buyers' last push; after 9:30 the hike printed nowhere outside 78 to 82 for the rest of the day, and the hold nowhere outside 16 to 22.
Then came the lunch hour, and the hold's biggest buying of the week. Between 12:19:58 and 12:43:24 p.m. 13 orders of 25,114 to 35,000 contracts, nine of them exactly 35,000, bought the hold at 18 and 19: about 432,000 contracts in 24 minutes, and the noon hour put 932,639 contracts through the hold, 862,811 of them buyers. The 167,570 contracts that defended 47 on September 4 came in 30,000- and 35,000-contract clips over 95 minutes. The clips are the same size. The price is 28 cents lower. The afternoon added 71,763 bought at 20 at 3:37 p.m., a 75,991-contract sweep at 20 at 4:17, and at 8:28:43 p.m. one sweep of about 152,000 contracts, its four largest fills 27,000 to 50,000, bought the hold at 21. The hike's sellers were quieter and bigger: 85,597 contracts sold at 80 at 5:57 p.m. and 31,428 at 79 at 8:42. From the release to the 8:55 p.m. board the hold traded about 6.45 million contracts, 4.65 million of them buyers crossing the spread, and the hike about 2.27 million, 963,000 buyers to 1.31 million sellers. That is more buying on the hold in one day than in the six days between the jobs report and the producer print combined, and its 8:55 p.m. bid of 21 is 20 cents below its last print before the number.
The Board After The CPI
Here is the full September decision board as of 8:55 p.m. ET Friday, September 11, with the prices this page has recorded since August 20 alongside for the trend. Kalshi reports trading in dollars of contract face value, one dollar per contract, the way the exchange itself displays it.
| September Outcome | Now, Sept. 11, 8:55 p.m. (bid/ask) | Sept. 10, 9:07 a.m. | Sept. 4, 7:18 p.m. | Aug. 20 | Traded, past 24 hours | Traded, lifetime (face value) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hike 25bps | 78/80¢ | 64/65¢ | 51/52¢ | 28/29¢ | $2.48 million | $10.8 million |
| Fed Maintains Rate | 21/22¢ | 34/35¢ | 47/48¢ | 69/70¢ | $7.20 million | $25.4 million |
| Hike >25bps | 1/2¢ | 1/2¢ | 1/2¢ | not recorded | $1.89 million | $11.7 million |
| Cut 25bps | 0/1¢ | 0/1¢ | 0/1¢ | 1¢ | $702,000 | $8.3 million |
| Cut >25bps | 0/1¢ | 0/1¢ | 0/1¢ | 1¢ | $99,300 | $1.3 million |
The decision, in one line: the hike is about four-in-five with no scheduled inflation data left, and the next thing that can move it is the committee itself, at 2 p.m. ET on Wednesday, September 16.
Start with the second row again, because it is the story of the day. The hold traded $7.2 million of face value in the 24 hours to 8:55 p.m., the biggest window on any contract in this page's record, and its lifetime volume went from $16.9 million on Thursday morning to $25.4 million, so about a third of everything that has ever traded on the hold traded in a day and a half. Its open interest went from about $11.2 million to $16.1 million; the hike's went from $4.5 million to $5.9 million. So a large share of the people who bought the hold on Friday, between 8 and 22, are still in it, and they are in it at 21. This board has said the same thing three times now, on September 4, on Wednesday and on Friday, each time louder: the price moves faster than the positions do, and the positions keep growing on the side the price is leaving. The hold's position is the largest it has ever been, at the lowest price it has ever had.
The third row is the one I keep coming back to, and Friday was the first day its volume did anything at all. "Hike >25bps" traded $1.89 million in the 24 hours to 8:55 p.m., about seven times its Thursday window of $277,000, on the day the core came in hot and the 2-year Treasury yield hit its highest since July 2024. It is quoted 1 bid, 2 ask, and its last print was a penny. Read with the two cut rows, still at zero bid and a penny ask, the board's statement is unchanged for the fourth straight edition: on September 16 the committee either moves a quarter-point or does not move at all. What changed Friday is how lopsided the market thinks that choice is, from two-in-three to four-in-five, and that a half-point got its biggest day of trading on this page and stayed on the floor.
Kalshi's rate-level board is the consistency check, and Friday it agreed to the cent. The target range's top sits at 3.75% today, so Kalshi's "rate above 3.75% after the September meeting" contract is the hike question asked a second way. Its last print before the release was 59; it printed 81 at 8:31:53 and 85 at 8:32:17, and at 8:55 p.m. it was 80 bid, 81 ask, a penny wide, on $831,617 of lifetime trading and $472,073 of open interest, from a 64-cent previous print. The rest of that ladder is a staircase with one step: every rung at or below 3.50% is 99 bid, and "above 4.00%," which needs a half-point move, is 1 bid, 2 ask, with everything higher at a penny. Polymarket US, which runs its own September board, reads the same way: the quarter-point hike 79 to 80, no change 20 to 21, and both the cut and the half-point under a penny. The forward boards are below against Thursday's column, because for the first time in this page's record they moved with September instead of ignoring it.
| Forward Board (Kalshi) | Now, Sept. 11, 8:55 p.m. (bid/ask) | Sept. 10, 9:07 a.m. |
|---|---|---|
| October Meeting: Hike 25bps | 36/38¢ | 27/28¢ |
| October Meeting: Fed Maintains Rate | 62/63¢ | 68/69¢ |
| December Meeting: Hike 25bps | 51/57¢ | 43/44¢ |
| December Meeting: Fed Maintains Rate | 42/47¢ | 45/48¢ |
| Rate Above 3.75% After December (Needs One Hike) | 87/88¢ | 76/80¢ |
| Rate Above 4.00% After December (Needs Two) | 49/52¢ | 36/37¢ |
| Rate Above 4.25% After December (Needs Three) | 6/14¢ | 4/8¢ |
On Thursday this page said a September hike getting 13 cents likelier had not made a second hike any likelier, that the market was pricing one move pulled forward and not a cycle, because "above 4.00% after December" sat at 36 to 37 while September ran. Friday it ran with it. The two-hike contract is 49 bid, 52 ask, a coin flip, up 13 cents at the bid in a day; "above 3.75%," which needs one, is 87 to 88 and no longer four cents wide; and the October decision board, which had barely moved all week, has a quarter-point hike at that meeting at 36 to 38 from 27 to 28. The December decision board's hike is 51 bid, 57 ask, a six-cent spread that says direction rather than price, and the three-hike contract at 6 to 14 is thinner still. But the sign is new. Through Jackson Hole, the jobs report, a week of oil and a 24% diesel print, the board that counts hikes had said one. On a 0.3% core print it started to say two, and Kiplinger's David Payne, who wrote last week that a bad August report would build pressure for hikes "at that meeting and the two following meetings in October and December," now has the market at a coin flip on the second of those three hikes and at 6 to 14 cents on the third.
What The Jobs Ladders Paid
This page priced the payroll and unemployment ladders on the morning of Friday, September 4, before the release, as the market's forecast of the report. They settled on it. Here is what each rung was quoted at 4:40 a.m. and how it resolved.
| Kalshi Contract (August Report) | Bid/ask, 4:40 a.m. ET Sept. 4 | Settled |
|---|---|---|
| Payrolls Above 0 | 71/74¢ | Yes |
| Payrolls Above 30,000 | 56/60¢ | Yes |
| Payrolls Above 40,000 | 52/56¢ | Yes |
| Payrolls Above 50,000 | 45/47¢ | Yes |
| Payrolls Above 60,000 | 30/34¢ | Yes |
| Payrolls Above 100,000 | 10/11¢ | Yes |
| Payrolls Above 150,000 | 4/5¢ | Yes |
| Unemployment Above 4.0% | 81/82¢ | Yes |
| Unemployment Above 4.1% | 42/45¢ | No |
| Unemployment Above 4.2% | 20/22¢ | No |
| Unemployment Above 4.3% | 3/4¢ | No |
The two rungs above 150,000 that this page did not list, at 175,000 and 200,000, settled no, so the print landed just above the rung the ladder had priced at four or five cents; every payroll rung on the table paid out yes, and the unemployment ladder, centered on 4.1% exactly, was the accurate half. That table is the honest measure of how far the pre-release price was from the release, and it is the reason the hold lost 16 cents in 30 seconds that morning: the market had another July at roughly one chance in four and got triple the median, plus a revision that erased July's loss entirely.
The Case For The Hold At 21 Cents
The hold is 21 cents, not 5, and the first argument for it is inside Friday's report. The 12-month core rate is 2.4%, matched the forecast, and is down from 2.5% in July (CBS News); food rose 0.1% with food at home flat; motor vehicle insurance fell 0.8% and medical care fell 0.2% (BLS); and the single biggest line in the headline was gasoline, which the BLS says did over a third of the month's increase by itself. The 12-month core, which already excludes energy, is at a 2021 low, per Yahoo Finance, which a committee can point to if it wants to. That is Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's argument from the G20 on August 31 in different words: "traditionally you don't raise into a supply shock unless you see second- or third-order effects." The barrel itself gave the doves their only good news of the day. Brent settled down 2.8% at $104.61 on Friday, snapping five straight days of gains, after Iranian state media said Tehran would meet Gulf states in Oman to discuss the Strait of Hormuz, per CNBC; it still finished the week up 8.7%, and it had peaked around $108 on Thursday.
The second argument is the one this page has carried since the jobs report, and Friday made it worse: wages are losing to prices. Real average hourly earnings fell 0.1% from July to August and are down 0.3% from a year ago, and the 30-year mortgage rate crossed 7% on Thursday, per NBC News. A labor market where pay is falling in real terms is not one generating the wage-driven inflation a hike is designed to stop, and a hike into it raises the cost of everything the affordability election is about. Goldman Sachs' Alexandra Wilson-Elizondo put the ambiguity in one line to CBS: "The challenge is that the data does not fully capture some of the inflation pressures." That cuts both ways, and the 21 cents is the price on a committee reading it the dovish way: a supply shock in the headline, a 2.4% core on the year, and a war it cannot hike away.
The hike's case is shorter than it was, because there is less left to argue about. Warsh set the test at Jackson Hole, confidence that inflation is moving to target "clearly and at sufficient speed," and Waller narrowed it to one report on September 3: whether the August data show the summer improvement "has been fleeting." A 0.3% core after 0.2% in July is the improvement stopping. Capital Economics' Stephen Brown: "The upside surprise to core CPI in August means the Fed looks set to hike next week" (Yahoo Finance). Northlight Asset Management's Chris Zaccarelli allowed that a hike is not certain, "but it's hard to see how the central bank can justify leaving rates on hold" (CNBC). The tape makes the same case without a quote. The hold's own buyers put 1.8 million contracts into it overnight to walk it from 35 to 44, watched the number erase that to 8 in 32 seconds, and came back in the same 35,000-contract clips 28 cents lower; the people most committed to the hold have now been wrong on every release since the jobs report and are paying less each time. Bostjancic added the sentence the diesel print set up on Thursday: "the renewed march higher in oil, gasoline and diesel prices add to concerns that higher energy prices could spill over to other goods and services and inflation expectations." Diesel hit a record $6.06 a gallon on Friday, per CBS. The three July dissenters have not changed their votes, and the bond market voted again: the 2-year yield rose 7.8 basis points to 4.628%, its highest since July 2024, the 10-year touched 4.992%, its highest since October 2023, before finishing at 4.97%, and the 30-year sat at 5.356% (CNBC). The European Central Bank had hiked to 2.5% the day before, citing "risks to the upside for inflation," per CNBC's Daily Open. CME FedWatch, which prices the same question off fed funds futures, went to about 86% from about 72% on Thursday, per CNBC, and roughly 87% from 50% a week ago, per Yahoo Finance; CNBC's report on the CPI itself rounded it to "nearly 90%."
Read the 78 to 80 against that last number, because for the first time on this page Kalshi is the cautious one. On Thursday Kalshi's hike closed at 65 under a FedWatch reading of about 72; on Friday night it sits at 78 to 80 under 86 to 90. Most of that gap is the hold's buyers, who are paying 21 for what the futures market prices near 10 to 14. With the half-point and cut legs at a penny, September is a two-outcome market, so the hike contract is simply the market's odds that Waller reads a 0.3% core the way he said he would: 78 to 80 on Kalshi, and near 87 in the futures market. The December ladder is the market's price on how many, and Friday it moved to "maybe two." Stocks, for what it is worth, rose on the day the hike went to four-in-five, the Dow up 509 points with oil falling, per Yahoo Finance.
What Is Left Before September 16
Waller's condition has been answered by the release he named, which leaves the calendar empty. Three scheduled reports stood between his September 3 remarks and the decision, and all three broke the same way: payrolls on September 4, producer prices on September 10, consumer prices on September 11. The only first-tier number left is August retail sales, at 8:30 a.m. ET on Wednesday, September 16 (Census Bureau), the morning of the vote, and this page said last week what it says now: too late to change a vote that is already being cast. The blackout covers every FOMC participant through September 17 (Atlanta Fed), so the last on-the-record word from a voter remains Waller's conditional, and the market has now priced all three of the reports he was waiting for against it without a word from him. Every move this page recorded in its first two weeks was a market reacting to a person. The last four were a market reacting to numbers. The next one, at 2 p.m. Wednesday, is a market reacting to a vote.
What can move the 78 to 80 in the meantime is the one thing no release controls, and Friday showed it can move either way. The Oman meeting on the strait took $3 off Brent in a day, and a committee deciding whether a 27% gasoline increase is a supply shock or an inflation problem will be watching whether the barrel keeps falling into Tuesday. The hold's 21 cents is a price on the committee seeing $100 oil, a 2.4% core on the year and falling real wages, and calling August a war. The hike's 78 is a price on Warsh's own words from Jackson Hole, "otherwise, we have work to do," applied to a core print that went the wrong direction on the one report the last voter to speak before the blackout said would decide him. The three penny legs say where the market is assigning only token odds, a half-point and a cut of any size, and a 0.3% core print, the number most likely to move the half-point, did not touch it.
On August 20 this page said the market was betting the data would rescue everyone before the committee had to choose. On September 4 the labor market read as permission. On September 10 the producer prices supplied the fuel. On Friday the consumer prices supplied the core, and the hold's buyers, who had bought every dip since the jobs report and been right about none of them, bought the biggest one yet. The hike goes into the weekend at four-in-five, with nobody at the Fed allowed to talk it back and nothing on the calendar that can, and the next print that matters is the statement at 2 p.m. Wednesday, about 113 hours after the board above.
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Reading The Prices
The penny row got louder, not quieter, and that reverses what this page read on Thursday. "Cut 25bps" is still quoted zero bid, one cent ask, as it has been all month, and it traded about $702,000 of face value in the 24 hours to 8:55 p.m. Friday, up from $261,000 in Thursday's window; the half-point hike, at 1 bid and 2 ask, traded $1.89 million against $277,000. Thursday's read was that shrinking penny volume meant the shock premium fading. Friday's volume says something simpler: on a day when $7.2 million went through the hold and $2.5 million through the hike, the penny contracts are where the people carrying those positions hedge the tails, and a tail hedge scales with the position, not with the odds. Nobody buying a cut at a penny on a 0.3% core print thinks a cut is coming, and nobody paying 2 cents for the half-point thinks a 0.3% core has earned one. What the two rows say together is that the size on this board multiplied on the day the decision got closest to settled, and the price on every leg that is not the quarter-point stayed exactly where it was.
The other thing Friday's tape teaches is the limit of the limit. On September 4 the hold's buyers absorbed 167,570 contracts at 47 in 95 minutes and the price held. On Wednesday they absorbed 751,000 between 43 and 46 and the price held overnight. On Thursday night they bought 1.8 million and walked it from 35 to 44, and this page would have called that a defended price at 8:29 a.m. At 8:30:32 it was 8. Then they came back and bought 4.65 million more between 8 and 22, 432,000 of it in 24 minutes at 18 and 19 in the same 35,000-contract clips that defended 47 a week earlier, and 152,000 in one second at 21 on Friday night. The open interest on the hold grew by about $4.9 million in a day. A defense holds against flow. It does not hold against a number, and after Friday there are no numbers left, so what the hold's buyers are defending now is a view of 12 voters, priced at one-in-five, with more money behind it than at any point this page has recorded.
The Political Thermometer
The political boards are the quiet ones, and Friday did not wake them. The one Warsh market on the board at this writing, pulled at 8:55 p.m. ET Friday, is Kalshi's "Kevin Warsh out as Fed chair" ladder: out before January 1, 2027 is 1 bid, 2 ask on 2,001 contracts of open interest, before 2028 is 3 to 5, and the only rung that traded in the past 24 hours was the one dated before 2030, 148 contracts, on the day his hike went to four-in-five. What did arrive on Friday, September 4, was the input those markets exist to price: a presidential post, two hours after the jobs report, telling the Fed to "Lower the interest rates," on the morning the exchange made his chairman's hike the favorite. National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett called the report a "blockbuster" and said the president "respects the independence of the Fed," per NBC News, in the same news cycle as the demand. The president's own line this week, per NBC News, was about the barrel and the calendar rather than the chairman: gas price relief may take until November, because "right after the election, oil prices are going to be tumbling downward." Set that against the 6.45 million contracts that traded on the hold after Friday's release and the read is unchanged: the money is on the decision, not the politics around it. Election proximity has not been the constraint people assume; in 2022 the Fed hiked six days before the midterm vote (Federal Reserve). What makes this one different is the setup: a hike would push borrowing costs higher into an election already being fought on affordability, delivered by the chairman this president picked to do the opposite, during a war this president is running, a week after the president asked in public for a cut. The market has that at about four-in-five, and there is no scheduled release left that can change the number before the vote.
Rate policy is also the quiet hand on every political market we cover, from House control to the Senate map, and Friday's report is the version of it voters feel first: gasoline did over a third of the month's inflation by itself, diesel set a record at $6.06 a gallon, real hourly pay fell for the month, and the market has the committee at about four-in-five to answer that with a hike seven weeks before the midterm. For where our analysts currently see the best value across the markets we do cover, the free expert picks page is updated daily.
Prices quoted are live Kalshi market prices as of 8:55 p.m. ET on Friday, September 11, 2026, except where another time is given, and will keep moving until these markets settle. Kalshi is a CFTC-regulated event-contract exchange; its platform policy requires users to be 18 or older, and availability varies by state. 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. Nothing here is a prediction of Federal Reserve policy. Trading involves risk; contracts can go to zero.
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