NPR.

On a On a recent weekend I went to the Art Institute of Chicago. I was there to visit a

specific painting a Sunday on La Grandeat 1884 by George Surah. It shows people relaxing along the Sun River in France.

Okay I'm walking closer.

Ah yes, even if you don't know the name of this painting you certainly have seen it before this

tranquil river scene constructed a tiny little colored dots but what you may be

wondering does this have to do with economics?

Great question. Well get this, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell used it as a visual

aid in a speech a few years ago.

As you can see, if you're too focused on a few dots, you may miss the

larger picture. Now Jerome Powell wasn't giving an art history lecture. He was

warning against reading too much into something called the dot plot. This is the

indicator from Planet Money, I'm Wailin Wong. And I'm Adrian Ma. The dot plot is

this graph that the Fed introduced a decade ago to be more transparent after the great financial crisis.

It shows where interest rates might go in the future, which as we know is one of the biggest

question marks for the U.S. economy right now.

And we got a few more data points today.

Inflation in May was up 3.3% from a year ago

and the Fed held interest rates study.

It also signaled that it could do one rate cut by the end of the year. But how

seriously to take that signal depends on your interpretation of the dot plot.

Today in the show we get up close with the Fed's dots and the debate around

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