In case you thought you were smart enough to know why the Fed wants to do what it supposedly wants to do [1] MarketWatch sets you straight with the real scoop.  We'll use this as a talking point and see what comes of it…

Here's the real reason the Fed wants to raise rates

Policy makers want to give themselves some room to maneuver

That is the commonly held belief and who am I to dispute it? A big part of the problem is and has been their refusal to begin a journey toward normalization 2 years ago, when the economy began to visibly (we noted the seeds of that improvement in January of that year) improve. They had no confidence and I was left to wonder (aloud here, frequently and I am sure, sometimes obnoxiously) why Grandma [2] (and her 0% savings account payout) had to continue to bear the brunt of this non-action despite a recovering economy.

The best conclusion I could come up with is that the entire scheme, from day 1, has been to reward asset owners and risk takers. Now the Fed is still stumbling and bumbling with the questions of ‘when?' and even ‘if?'. We noted that in the span of the last 3 weeks, when things got just a little dicey during the Greek drama (a cut rate ‘b' production I might add) some Jawbone could not wait to trip all over himself gulping down a mic, talking about rate hikes being pushed to 2016. Here we recall Hawk-in-drag Bullard last October giving the ‘tell' to anyone who still believed these clowns were in control of some kind of normal economy, as he titillated the market with the likes of ‘we can always do QE 4 ya know'.

That preamble behind us, let's see what MarketWatch thinks we should know about “real” reasoning…

Federal Reserve policy makers are hoping, even praying, that no unexpected domestic development or international crisis intervenes to prevent them from taking the first baby step to normalize interest rates at the Sept.16-17 meeting.

US interest rates have nothing to do with these global occurrences that are a fact of life in a leveraged, credit propped global construct. It's the economy, stupid.