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The U.S. Federal Reserve's Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting minutes today (Wednesday) have one thing working in its favor.
It can carry on aimless monetary policy with impunity. The lead dissenters have all but been silenced in 2015.
You see, over the last year, Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen has had to find a comfortable middle ground between the hawks and the doves within her ranks.
Does she tease a rate hike through the Fed's periodic statements and risk spooking the markets? Or does she continue on an easy money path that has been artificially propping up the markets for too long?
She's been unsuccessful in answering either question. Instead, she's left investors in the dark and tried to comfort markets with vague assurances that the Fed will keep a discerning eye on the economic picture. She made this clear in last month's press conference following the FOMC meeting.
"It was the finest verbal judo we've seen in a long time," Money Morning Chief Investment Strategist Keith Fitz-Gerald said after the March FOMC meeting. "She said everything about nothing and made it look like Alan Greenspan actually spoke succinctly."
This provides another reason for investors to brush off these Fed meetings. Yellen isn't going to give any clear guidance on the direction of monetary policy.
That's because the Fed doesn't know what it's doing, and it's taking a wait-and-see approach to put off making the tough decisions.
But this year, Yellen can at least "wait and see" without the Fed's clueless approach coming into question from within.
And from a credibility standpoint, that's going to help the Fed. But it's only going to continue to confuse markets…
The Biggest Problem with the FOMC Meeting Minutes Today
The retirements of regional Fed Presidents Richard Fisher and Charles Plosser will silence the case for a clearer timeline on rate hikes.
These two added an important presence to the Fed. Their dissent helped highlight the purposeless goalpost shifting of the FOMC, and its insistence on maintaining a dovish stance in the face of improving economic data.
At one point, the Fed said an unemployment rate of 6.5% would be enough to hike rates. Yellen changed her tune, however, when the U.S. economy came close to reaching that number. In April 2014, it fell to 6.2%. She seemed to openly admit the 6.5% threshold was a misguided benchmark. Instead, she said policy decisions should be fashioned around an all-encompassing view of the economic picture.
Unemployment is now at 5.5%, and we don't know what role this will actually play in the FOMC's rate decision.
Another Fed dissenter, Narayana Kocherlakota, became more important as 2014 wound down and the Fed began to loosen its language on rate hikes.