Adam Davidson notes in his NYTIMES piece –
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/magazine/youre-not-supposed-to-understand-the-federal-reserve.html
“If the Fed added
up all the ways a rate increase helped people in the short term and subtracted
all the ways it hurt them, they would never raise rates. While there are
winners and losers, on balance a Fed rate increase means the economy will slow
down, which on average is worse for everybody. The entire point of a central
bank like the Federal Reserve is to empower one group of people to do something
as unpopular as slow the economy down. That’s because, from time to time, an economy
grows so fast that it leads to a bubble, inflation or both. The Fed’s job is to
predict when this is going to happen and stop it before it does by slowing the
economy just as people feel the most excited. When the Fed
eventually does raise rates, it will be covered with near hysteria. It will be
on the front page of every paper, on every cable-news show. And most Americans
won’t understand what any of it means. Their confusion won’t be helped by the
media’s — and their own — instinct to understand the process through single
significant moments. But trying to understand the Fed that way is like trying
to make sense of a long marriage, with its small daily compromises, joys and
miseries, by watching one big fight or one romantic dinner.”