December Is Already Fully Priced, So Six Fed Speakers Can Only Move a Ten Per Cent Tail. And the Issuer Says 16:15, Not 16:30.
A quarter-point December hike is fully discounted on the one feed anybody names, which means six Federal Reserve speakers between 14:00 and 23:30 UTC cannot move the base case at all — only a half-point tail priced near ten per cent, and a January meeting nobody has priced. The wire carrying that schedule prints three December figures from CME FedWatch, and they are one observation in three dresses: 25 basis points certain plus a ten per cent chance of a further 25 gives 27.50, the page says 27.6, and solving backwards gives a half-point probability of exactly 10.40 per cent — the same figure we published yesterday from a different route. Store all three as separate inputs and your system counts one number three times. Waller's half-point condition has already fired: he said in London on 10 November that it may be needed if October core CPI came in near 0.3 per cent or higher, and core CPI printed 0.3. The market pays about ten per cent for it. We also settle a dispute we published this morning, and nobody who agreed was right: two aggregators put Goolsbee at 16:30, one put him at 16:15, and the Chicago Fed's own page says 10:15 am CT, which with daylight time over is 16:15 UTC. The lone dissenter matched the issuer. The same page calls the event a moderated virtual discussion with a named journalist, where one aggregator calls it a speech — a scheduled event with no document to read. And the day's only US government release is framed by calendars that are broken in three adjacent rows: three publishers give consensuses of 203,000, 191,000 and 195,000, a 12,000 spread, while the Labor Department's own 5 November release shows 189,000 belongs to the week ending 31 October and 1,718,000 to the week ending 24 October, both filed a week forward, and a four-week average sitting in a level field. The one-week lag between initial and continuing claims is built into the release by design, and a vendor that aligns them to one date has deleted it.