Bonds rose, pushing yields on the 10-year note two basis points lower to 1.55 per cent, according to Bloomberg.
"These notes really show that they're giving the same amount of ammunition to the hawks and the doves," Mark Heppenstall, the Horsham, Pennsylvania-based chief investment officer of Penn Mutual Asset Management.
"We still have a lot of economic numbers to be released between now and December, so if I had to guess, I would say that the earliest we see a hike would be early 2017."
I don't think anything in these minutes supports a quicker rate increase and again, I think that they're data dependent still.
In the Dow, gains in shares of Pfizer and those of DuPont, up 0.8 per cent each respectively, offset slides in shares of Cisco and those of Intel, down 1.2 per cent and 0.8 per cent respectively.
"I don't think anything in these minutes supports a quicker rate increase and again, I think that they're data dependent still," Chris Gaffney, president of Everbank World Markets in St Louis, told Reuters.
Weighing on sentiment were disappointing results from Target, down 6.1 per cent as of 3.16pm in New York, as well as from Lowe's, down 5.5 per cent.
In Europe, the Stoxx 600 Index ended the day with a 0.8 per cent slide from the previous close. The UK's FTSE 100 index slid 0.5 per cent, France's CAC 40 index retreated 1 percent, while Germany's DAX index fell 1.3 per cent.