November Fed minutes show it’s closer to raising rates

WASHINGTON — Federal Reserve officials earlier this month believed it would be appropriate to raise a key interest rate “relatively soon,” with some arguing that an increase should come at the next meeting in December so the Fed could preserve its credibility.

Some officials argued that if the Fed does not raise rates at its December meeting, it runs the risk of harming the central bank’s credibility given the many signals it had sent about an impending hike.

Economists believed that the Fed would not want to risk destabilizing financial markets with a rate hike just before voters went to the polls.

The CME Group’s FedWatch barometer, which tracks investors’ moves in the futures market, puts the probability of an interest rate increase in December at 93.5 percent.

[...] a significant slowdown in U.S. growth in the first half of the year, as well as global weakness and periodic bouts of financial market turbulence, has kept the central bank on the sidelines.