What Are Central Bank Meeting Minutes

What the minutes are

Meeting minutes are the written record of the committee's discussion, published three weeks after the decision they describe. They say who argued what, how many wanted something else, how close the vote was and what worried them, none of which the one-page statement said on the day. They land at two in the afternoon in Washington, 21:00 on the feed's clock. The decision of 28 January 2026 moved the euro against the dollar 37.9 pips at its minute, where a pip is the fourth decimal place of the price; the minutes of that meeting, on 18 February, moved it 9.8, and the next set, on 8 April, 4.4, less than an ordinary five-minute bar that day.

The transcript of a jury room

Picture the transcript of a jury room, opened three weeks after the verdict. The verdict was one word, read out on the day, and everyone traded on it then; the transcript is the three hours of argument that produced it, and it is read for how close the vote was and who nearly voted the other way. The minutes are that transcript. The gold lines are the sentences the market reads twice, the ones that begin several participants, or a number of members, or some, because those are the sentences that say how divided the room was, which the verdict never said.

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