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The desk published its levels before the data, and last week the data answered three of them. Payrolls printed 29,000 and the two-year held the 4.80 line the desk had set as the test of a second rise. The Treasury's buyback door was offered forty-six billion dollars against a six billion limit, the queue the desk measured in August back at twice its size. And high-yield spreads closed through the 3.10 signal the desk published in August as the one number that changes its map. Every call is scored below, including the one the desk got wrong: retiring the queue claim two sessions before the queue returned.

The committee raised rates on 16 September without a single dissent, deleted the energy language from its statement and put one more rise in the dots. The desk registered four tests on that decision and pre-committed in print to scoring them on the following Thursday's settle. It did not. This note scores them seven sessions late, says so in the first row of its own table, and then scores a level and a claim the desk had to defend and did not hold: a thirty-year range that broke on 24 September and has widened since, and a buyback queue the desk is retiring rather than arguing with. What survived is the mechanism, and it is the part worth reading. Measured from the close before the August inflation print, the ten-year is twenty-nine basis points higher and the market's own inflation forecast is six lower. The whole move is real, and then some.

The first enlarged buyback was disappointing before it ran. Treasury capped Thursday's ten to twenty year operation at $6bn, above the $4bn floor it had guided and below the $10bn some had come to expect, and the curve sold the number into a $100 barrel: the ten-year to its highest in nearly three years, the thirty-year into the upper half of the range the desk redrew in August, the two-year backing up toward the Fed's own week. On Thursday the desk got both hands on one tape, a $22bn thirty-year auction at 18:00 London and the operation itself an hour later. The read was written down before the prints and is scored on the settles below.

Payrolls printed 162,000 against a consensus near 56,000, and the revision mattered more: July's minus 23,000, the hinge of the desk's registered growth test, was revised to plus 21,000. The first negative print no longer exists, so the second one can no longer be the test. The desk's internal pre-print branch map carried this outcome at fifteen percent, and the desk scores that first, before the argument. What survives the print: the wage line stayed quiet, the services survey still says contraction, and everything now compresses onto Friday's CPI, the reweight the desk pre-committed a month ago.