The Fed should raise rates next week

IT'S quite ironical and even funny when you think about it - lax monetary policy and unbridled deregulation by the Greenspan Fed in the late 1990s and early 2000s spawned a massive property bubble in US real estate whose crash later triggered the sub-prime crisis, and this prompted the Bernanke Fed to employ even more lax policies to bail everyone out and prop up a cratering and crooked US financial system.

Now, exactly eight years after that sordid chapter in US financial history, cheap money has become the go-to drug of choice, with markets from the US to Japan to China heavily reliant on it to stay afloat, ever-hopeful that monetary authorities will stay accommodative, even if it's for a few more weeks. To borrow from a phrase by former Fed chairman William McChesney Martin, everyone at the party wants the punch to keep flowing, even if it's for only a little while longer.

Herein lies the problem - that "little while" has been dragged on for years and is constantly being pushed out further and further. Along the way the Fed has found new reasons for delaying raising interest rates and removing the punch bowl - earlier this year it waited because of massive volatility in China, later it was because of turmoil caused by falling oil prices, then came the uncertainty brought on by the Brexit vote, and most recently it was because of patchy US employment numbers.