By John Mauldin | Mauldin Economics
Will they or won’t they? Next week the Federal Reserve might raise interest rates. Many of Wall Street’s worker bees have never seen a rate hike. They were still in school (or skipping school) when the Fed last tightened in 2006.
As readers know, I believe the Federal Open Market Committee should hike rates ASAP. A number of very astute analysts and Fed observers agree with me. On the other hand, an equal-sized army of similarly smart analysts think they should not. It seems to me this recovery is getting long in the tooth. The Fed needs to give itself some room to stimulate when the economy turns down again. As it stands now, their only weapons are to take interest rates negative or to resume quantitative easing. We don’t want either of those.