FOMC composition and current voting bloc

The Federal Open Market Committee has twelve voting members at any given meeting: the seven members of the Board of Governors, the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and four of the remaining eleven Reserve Bank Presidents on a one-year rotating schedule. The Hawkometer tracks all twelve voters plus the non-voting regional Presidents, since their public language still shapes market expectations and they can rotate into the voting seat the following year.

In the current rotation, Chair Jerome Powell, Vice Chair Philip Jefferson, the New York Fed’s John Williams, and Governors Christopher Waller, Michelle Bowman, Lisa Cook, Adriana Kugler and Michael Barr all carry votes alongside the rotating regional Presidents. Among the non-voting Presidents, Boston’s Susan Collins, San Francisco’s Mary Daly, Atlanta’s Raphael Bostic and Dallas’s Lorie Logan have been the most active public speakers, and their language has been a leading indicator for the next year’s voting cohort.

Where the committee sits right now

The chart below shows the FOMC’s voter-weighted committee score over the last twelve months, smoothed with a 90-day rolling window.

The shaded area on the upper half of zero marks periods when the committee’s communication tilted hawkish; the lower shading marks dovish periods. Individual speeches appear as faint dots, so it is easy to spot outliers.

Speaker-by-speaker scores

The scatter below ranks every FOMC member and regional Fed President by their 90-day rolling Hawkometer score. Voters are drawn with a bold outline.

What this typically reveals at the Fed:

• Two centres of gravity. Chair Powell tends to anchor near the committee average. The hawkish wing — historically Waller, Bowman, Logan and Schmid — clusters above the line; the dovish wing tends to include Cook, Kugler and at times Daly.
• Regional dispersion is wider than Board dispersion. Reserve Bank Presidents have more freedom to take public positions because they are not designing the SEP-level guidance. That widens the visible range of the index without necessarily widening the actual policy distribution at the meeting.
• The Vice Chair for Supervision is not a policy proxy. Their public language often focuses on regulatory and financial stability topics, which the Hawkometer treats as orthogonal to monetary policy.

Recent speeches and current shifts

Pay particular attention to the shift indicator in the table above. A meaningful negative shift over the last 30 days versus the prior 60 — particularly if it shows up in voters rather than non-voters — is a stronger signal than a single dovish-sounding paragraph from any one speaker.

Upcoming FOMC appearances

The calendar below is the next two weeks of scheduled public remarks by FOMC members. It is a leading indicator of when the Hawkometer is likely to move next.

Press conferences after the FOMC meeting carry the most weight by a long way: the Chair’s prepared remarks and Q&A often shift the committee’s score by more than a full point in either direction. Outside the meeting cycle, Jackson Hole in late August, the House Financial Services and Senate Banking semi-annual testimonies, and major Brookings or Peterson Institute speeches are the highest-impact set-piece events.

How this connects to rate decisions

The Hawkometer is one of three lenses Central Bank Watch publishes on the Fed:

• Market-implied probabilities — what fed funds futures say about the probability of each rate outcome at upcoming meetings.
• Taylor Rule analysis — how restrictive or accommodative the current fed funds rate is relative to a model-implied benchmark.
• Hawkometer (this page) — what the committee is saying, scored and aggregated.

When all three line up — for example, market-implied probabilities tilting toward a cut, a negative Taylor Rule rate gap, and a Hawkometer score moving below zero — the case for an imminent policy move is strongest. When they diverge, the question becomes which lens is the more accurate one for the current cycle. The Hawkometer is intentionally the most subjective of the three, and we encourage cross-referencing it against the other two before drawing trading conclusions.

Limitations specific to the Fed

A few cautions that apply more strongly here than elsewhere:

• The Fed speaks more than any other central bank. The volume of FOMC communication means short-term swings in the index can reflect who spoke this week as much as what the committee thinks. The 90-day rolling window is designed to smooth this out, but readers comparing day-to-day readings should remember it.
• The blackout period matters. In the ten days before each FOMC meeting, members do not speak publicly. The index will appear to “freeze” during these windows; that is by design.
• Powell anchors expectations. When the Chair speaks, markets weight the Hawkometer reading more heavily than our voter-weighted aggregate suggests. The index does not currently apply additional Chair-level weighting; we recommend reading Chair appearances alongside the aggregate, not as a substitute for it.

For the full scoring methodology and phrase library, see the Hawkometer methodology page.