Not Fed Up

Prediction: The Federal Reserve Bank will NOT raise interest rates in December ... NOR will it raise interest rates until, at the earliest, December of 2016.

The logic behind this forecast is as follows: ... the current roiled state of terrorist actions in Europe ... and their inevitable economic fallout ... suggests that the reaction to an interest rate increase by the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank would likely have an out-of-proportion effect on the world's financial markets. Given that Fed Chairman,  Janet Yellen, has been chary about such a move in the past, it seems more than likely she, and the rest of the Open Market Committee, will defer once again.

Next year is an election year and, given that the Fed has, in the past, tended toward favoring the Democrat party, I think it unlikely that it would risk damaging Hillary Clinton's chances for the presidency by raising interest rate in 2016 ... any time before the November election.

Thus, I would predict that the earliest that the Fed would make such an interest-rate move ... and assuming economic conditions would still warranted it ... would be December of 2016.