I switch to Turner Classics whenever the Fed is about to make some idiotic announcement that will get hyped reverentially by TV’s business reporters. It’s incredible, and not just a little pathetic, that so many pundits and investors still seem to believe a rate hike is coming. My prediction, as regular readers of this page will already know, is that the Fed will NEVER raise rates. This forecast has held up well for nine years, and I don’t expect it to be challenged in 2016 — let alone in December, which has become the latest supposed target-month for a rate hike that remains as likely as a Martian invasion.

Not that the Fed could easily and arbitrarily raise short-term rates, even if it were to decide it is time, finally, to “walk the walk”. Some observers evidently think a token tightening of perhaps 25 to 5o basis points would help reassert the Fed’s authority following years of empty threats and mushy policy statements.  However, a recent story in the Wall Street Journal explained how very difficult it can be to tighten when surplus trillions in stimulus money is still jangling around in the financial ether. Knowing this, the Fed supposedly has experimented with reverse-repos to manipulate the federal funds rate. However, it remains to be seen whether the infinitesimally small successes they achieved would be repeatable over time and under duress.

Regardless,the stock market will continue to react to the most opaque, meaningless drivel the Fed can churn out as though it were earth-shattering news. One suspects that the market actually cares little about the drivel itself and that the wild price swings that occur when the drivel hits the tape are merely a reflection of the fevered, brazen opportunism that has come to drive securities markets around the world. That financial markets should take on the dishonest character of a carnival midway is an embarrassment to civilization itself. Not that you’d even remotely sense this from reading what passes for news these days.