Today is a strange sort of day that hasn’t been seen often since September 21st; a day with zero speakers from the US Federal Reserve.

Of late, Fed members have been lined up in their droves to give personal opinions to anyone and everyone, sometimes making several appearances a week. Whilst varying from the most optimistic of hawks to the most cautious of doves, each speech has been laden with interest-rate based rhetoric and opinion, all of them having implications for the trading on global stock markets.

In the run up to September’s meeting, where markets seemed divided as to what the outcome of the meeting would be, it look a last ditch speech by renowned dove Gael Brainard as a mouthpiece for Chair Janet Yellen’s to herd general opinion into predicting an ‘unchanged’ position. In the run up to the two final Federal Open Market Committee meetings in November and December the debate rages on as to when the rate rise will take place, if at all.

Tomorrow’s US Non-Farm Payrolls serves as the most significant piece of US economic data since the FOMC meeting in December and could provide markets and investors alike the impetus to price in for a Fed rate hike before the end of 2016. Should the payroll data echo that of today’s announcement from its lesser regarded peer, US Jobless claims, we might be in for an interesting proposition. Today saw the dataset’s four-week moving average fall to its lowest rate since 1973, with an 83rd week of a reading below 300,000 claiming the title of the longest streak since 1970.

The good data, bad data conundrum once again comes to the fore should tomorrow’s data prove just as record-breaking. At what point does the payroll data force Fed policymakers to consider a November hike as opposed to the more widely expected decision for a December hike? Even more poignantly, what would the reading need to be for us to completely disregard a rate hike this year at all?

The issue of predicting how the Fed will read into important data sets such as tomorrow is becoming ever more clouded with the continuing disagreement publicly aired for all to hear. Long gone are the days where one could simply assume the wider implications on monetary policy of a data release. 2008 and the era of accommodative policy put an end to that.

Should the Fed be allowed to play with stock markets the way in which they have over the best part of this year? Markets have risen, fallen and then risen again, always waiting with baited breath for the next release of data that might shred an inkling of light into the mind of the FOMC. But time and time again, investors priced in for one eventuality succumb to the reality of another.

Maybe it’s time for the Fed to do away with the endless charade of giving personal opinion on monetary policy, in particular interest rates, in order to return a small sliver amount of normality into the proceedings of financial markets. Think of the analysts, at least…

Henry Croft, Research Analyst, 6th October