Markets found little new information in the minutes. The S&P 500, which had been negative earlier in the day, rose slightly. Treasury bond yields barely budged.

The January meeting was a departure by the Fed from what had been a slow and steady march toward higher rates and less stimulative monetary policy amid a strengthening economy. After five consecutive quarters of raising rates, Fed officials left them unchanged in January, as expected. But they surprised markets in the policy statement released after the meeting, which dropped previous language that said “some further gradual increases” in interest rates would be warranted in the months to come.

That shift appears to have been, in part, a corrective note to financial markets, which officials believed had turned volatile in December on the belief that Fed officials were not sufficiently worried about economic uncertainty at home and abroad — or willing to adopt more stimulative policy measures if those uncertainties turned into economic drags.

The Fed’s communication after its December meeting, when officials raised rates by a quarter of a percentage point, “were reportedly perceived by market participants as not fully appreciating the tightening of financial conditions and the associated downside risks to the U.S. economic outlook that had emerged since the fall,” the minutes said.

Officials worried in particular that investors did not have a clear picture of how the Fed planned to deal with the slimming of the bond portfolio it amassed in the wake of the financial crisis. In addition to lowering interest rates to near zero, the Fed tried to goose the economy by purchasing large quantities of mortgage bonds and Treasury securities, as a way to encourage investors to buy riskier assets, like stocks.