The FOMC Meets Alone This Week

The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the US Federal Reserve's rate-setting body, gathered today and will announce its next policy move on Wednesday. In recent years, Brazilian investors have grown accustomed to so-called “Super Wednesdays,” when the Fed and Brazil's own monetary policy committee, the Copom, reveal decisions on the same day. This week breaks that pattern: the Copom's next meeting is not until the following week, leaving the FOMC to act alone.

The scheduling gap is almost entirely down to the arithmetic of independent calendars. Both committees meet eight times a year, always convening on a Tuesday and delivering their verdict on Wednesday. But the FOMC spaces its meetings roughly six weeks apart, while the Copom follows a strict 45-day cadence. Add national holidays, which can push a meeting forward or back, and perfect alignment becomes rare.

Since its last meeting in mid-June, the Fed will have waited 43 days to reconvene. The Copom, by contrast, will have gone 50 days between its June session and next week's gathering. That seven-day difference helps explain why the two institutions' calendars sometimes converge and other times drift apart. Month-to-month variations in data-release schedules—each bank's true lodestar—also play a role, making any attempt to permanently link the dates impractical.

Why Central Bank Calendars Don't Often Sync

A Near-Coincidence, Not a Design

The notion that a Super Wednesday reflects coordination between the world's largest central bank and Latin America's largest is mistaken. Neither institution consults the other's calendar when setting its own. The FOMC anchors its meeting schedule to the flow of US employment, inflation and GDP data, while the Copom times its decisions around the release of Brazilian inflation reports, GDP figures and exchange-rate developments. The fact that they occasionally land on the same Wednesday is a simple matter of probability, not policy.

The Upside for the Copom

When the calendars do diverge, the Copom often ends up meeting a few days after the FOMC. That ordering gives Brazilian policymakers a brief but useful window to observe market reactions, US dollar movements and any signals from the Fed's statement before they finalize their own decision. On days when both committees act simultaneously, the Copom's communication—usually released at 6:30 pm Brasília time—lands hours after the Fed's 3:00 pm announcement. A one-week gap removes that rush and may offer the central bank's staff a calmer backdrop for assessing external conditions.