The Federal Reserve will at 2 p.m. ET publish minutes of the policy meeting held earlier in May.

As expected, the Federal Open Market Committee left its benchmark interest rate unchanged, and markets anticipate that it would hike again at the June meeting. CME’s FedWatch Tool reflects an 83.1% probability that the FOMC would increase the rate to a 1%-1.25% range.

This year, equal attention is being paid to another part of the Fed’s normalization process after years of zero interest rates: paring down its $US4.5 trillion balance sheet.

That’s one thing markets will be parsing the minutes for; the prior one said the Fed plans to change its reinvestment policy this year. On Tuesday, Philadelphia Fed President Patrick Harker said in New York that the Fed intends to be “as boring as possible.” That means it wants to be quite slow and calculated so that market participants are not spooked at any stage.

The statement after its May meeting indicated that the FOMC thought that economic weakness in the first quarter was transitory. Weak consumer spending slowed growth, and the reasons economists have cited for that include delayed tax refunds and a tendency for first-quarter growth to undershoot the rest of the year.

More to come …

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