How doth thou tease me, thy fairest rate hike

ONCE again the Fed meets, To determine who eats and who gets beat.

Will it raise rates again this week and allow savers To get the yields that they savor? Or will it stop hiking so Washington and banks,

Can once again stop and give the Fed thanks? Four times in two years Janet Yel

len’s Fed has lifted borrowing costs. But that was more to show Wall Street exactly who was boss.

Then weeks ago Yellen pulled a fast one.

When she realized the economy was headed for disaster.

Not so fast on the rate hikes, she relayed That can wait for another day. On Wednesday the Fed makes its announcement, crafted by its board and Yellen.

God only knows which version of economy they’ll be sellin’. There are only so many ways that I can tell the same old story, so this time I tried it with rhyme.

As I’ve said over and over, the Fed has itself in a bind.

It must raise rates because Americans need higher yields on their savings accounts. Without the higher yields, millions of households can’t increase their spending.

And if they can’t spend more, the US economy isn’t going to grow at a reasonable rate. Low rates have, in essence, been a secret tax on savers. And this tax is holding the economy down.

But there’s the other side of this dilemma.

Without low rates, businesses may pull back — and that won’t be good for the economy either. Even worse, higher interest rates will make Washington’s deficits bigger because our government will have to pay higher yields to borrow money. That’s also bad for the economy. It’s a classic Catch-22 and it has been going on for years. The Fed is damned if it does raise rates and damned if it doesn’t.

At this week’s meeting, the Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee probably won’t raise rates. Fed Chair Yellen has indicated she is getting nervous about hiking them too quickly. An announce- ment will come tomorrow.

But be on the lookout for the Fed telling us how it plans to trim its balance sheet of those trillions of dollars in bonds it purchased under the quantitative easing scheme.

If QE was dangerous when it was being set up, it’s even more so now that it will undergo unwinding.

My poetry may be bad. But so is the job the Fed has been doing. My rhyming is hopeless. Let’s pray that the Fed can improve on what it does.

With its budget a mess and a task force trying to figure out how it will be able to afford to conduct the nationwide census in 2020 — a head count required by the US Constitution — the Census Bureau is cutting back.

Because of budget slices, the Census Bureau is dropping trials it was to have conducted in West Virginia and Washington state.

The bureau is trying to find new, higher-tech ways to get responses from people that don’t require house-to-house surveying.

John H. Thompson, the soon-tobe-exiting director of the Census Bureau, probably wants to solve this issue before he leaves toward the end of the year. But he has had four years to figure it out — and he hasn’t.

I have a landline telephone in my house, mostly because I occasionally need to use a fax machine.

I got exactly one legitimate call on that landline phone over the last few months — from an insurance company that didn’t know better. One legitimate call. In months! Usually, when that phone rings, I ignore it. Or I pick up the receiver and hang up immediately. Or, if I’m in a playful mood, I set it aside and let the person on the other end talk while I’m not listening.

Probably the only item in myy house that was less usefull over the same time period was the waffle iron.

It won’t be much longer before landline phones are obsolete. But I am going to hang on to the waffle iron. I’m hoping it will come in handy one day.

Federal spending topped $400 billion for the first time in June.

That has the unfortunate distinction of beating the record of $392.8 billion that was spent in March of 2017.

I mention this because the US debt is getting awfully close to $20 trillion — a level which, as I said in a column a while ago, the media should give as much attention as it does whenever the Dow Jones industrial average passes through milestones.

Except, of course, the US debt level is more of a millstone around the country’s neck than a milestone.

As of Monday afternoon, the US National Debt Clock is less than $34 billion shy of $20 trillion.

This has nothing to do with money or finance but, like everyone else, I’m fascinated by O.J. Simpson. And when he was granted parole the other day, I watched the whole pproceeding. The unconvicted murderer now has to stay clear of convicted felons as a requirement of getting released. How many felons, who are running around with cell phone cameras, would like to sneak into a picture with O.J. — just to get him put back behind bars? I’m not saying felons should take on this role. But I wonder if anyone has a pool going on the amount of time The Juice will stay free.