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Here's your midday brief for Monday, September 22nd. I'm Zoe Colkin for the Wall Street Journal.

We're exclusively reporting Atlanta Fed President Rafael Bostic said inflation concerns would make him hesitant for now to support further rate cuts in October, despite the greater worries about employment in recent months.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Bostick said he penciled in only one rate cut for all of

2025 at the Federal Reserve's meeting last week. He added that he is concerned about inflation

continuing to run above the Fed's 2% goal. He does not expect inflation to return to that level

until 2028. Leading real estate brokerage Compass said it has agreed to acquire

rival anywhere real estate for $1.6 billion, a clear sign that a long stretch of lackluster

home sales is forcing industry consolidation. The all-stock transaction would create an

industry giant with an enterprise value of about $10 billion, including debt, making it one of the

largest deals in the residential brokerage industry. According to real trends, Compass and Anywhere

were already the first and second biggest brokerages by volume last year.

And Pfizer has agreed to pay up to $7.3 billion to acquire weight loss drug developer

Metzara. The deal would get the New York drug maker back in the obesity drug game after it

scrapped its own experimental weight loss pill due to safety concerns earlier this year.

The acquisition adds four clinical stage programs to Pfizer's pipeline, including oral and

injectable candidates.

Heads up, an artificial intelligence tool helped us make this episode by creating summaries that

were based on WSJ reporting and then reviewed and adapted by an editor.

We'll have more coverage of the day's news on the WSJ's What's News podcast.

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