Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen is in an unpleasant position these days facing a market uncertain of where it is heading in the near future.
When the Fed could have raised rates it didn't. Now that it wants to, it may not be so easy to do so without creating significant commotion in the same financial markets it has sought to mollify.
"There will never be a good time to raise rates off zero when you've been there for six years," Peter Boockvar, chief market analyst at The Lindsey Group, told CNBC.
The Fed hasn't raised rates since June 2006.
Here’s Boockvar’s take on the situation: zero interest rates were a response to the worst U.S. economic crisis since the Great Depression. The economy today is far removed from its crisis days. Since the recession ended in mid-2009, gross domestic product has been on a steady if slow move upwards and financial markets, which have received by far the most benefit from Fed programs, have soared. While all this was happening, the Fed could have begun the tightening process without disrupting the recovery.
But it didn’t. And now it finds itself at a point where it intends to tighten at a time when its biggest global counterparts are easing. According to Boockvar, the result is a solid dollar, an imminent earnings recession in which U.S. profits are forecast to decline in two consecutive quarters, and first-quarter GDP gains that could be almost nonexistent.
Interest Rates Will Rise
Still, in a speech in San Francisco on Friday, Yellen repeated her intention to raise interest rates in 2015 while emphasizing that the approach would be unlike any other in recent times. She cited several reasons for being responsive to incoming data and for paying heightened attention to “special risks.”
“The actual path of policy will evolve as economic conditions evolve, and policy tightening could speed up, slow down, pause, or even reverse course depending on actual and expected developments in real activity and inflation,” she said. “What matters for financial conditions and the broader economy is the entire expected path of short-term interest rates and not the precise timing of the first rate increase,” she said.