Another Fed meeting has come and passed and, as expected, dang near nothing happened.  Benchmark rates are being held between 0 and .25% and no more money has been committed to buying long-term treasuries.  Pretty quiet meeting.

Buuuuuuut, it’s the calm before the storm.

Let’s think about things.  The Fed is holding mortgage rates down manually through these treasury purchases.  That program will expire in October, meaning rates are inexorably headed higher at that time.  The $8000.00 tax credit will expire at the end of November as well.  Merry friggin’ Christmas.

That’s a double-smack to real estate.  And, I may be alone on this one, but I’m pretty sure that shoot­ing the knees out from the real estate market is…dumb.  Really dumb.  Like, heave us kicking and screaming back into recession, dumb.  Stabbing a fork into an electrical socket while standing in a kid­die pool and juggling lit Molotov cocktails, dumb.

Okay, that last one was a tad extreme.  But you get the message.

Stocks are doing super-dee-duper because companies are posting great numbers.  But, the majority of that improvement is coming via the billions that us taxpayers spent to subsidize their problems.  So, yes, it’s cool that the Armageddon-style, we’re all going to lose our jobs and have to resort to subsis­tence farming to feed our kids scenario has passed.  But life is not peachy keen quite yet.

So, Swami-Greg has some predictions to make:

The heat on Obama to stop overspending will result in the expiration of the real estate friendly pro­grams to stem the tide of governmental debt.  The holiday season will hit and consumers wont spend nearly the money that Wall Street is hoping they will spend.  Corporate numbers will start to falter. 

And the mighty U. S. of A. will limp into 2010, the anointed recovery year, rather weak.

What happens then is up in the air.  But one thing is for sure: I am quite glad I am not a politician.  I have a hard enough time deciding between paper and plastic, much less guiding the country through a financial minefield.