James Grant, editor of Grant's Interest Rate Observer, cautions investors not to believe all the Wall Street chatter they may hear about a possible Federal Reserve rate hike anytime soon.

“The Federal Reserve will not act.  I think the Fed wants to, I think it would love to normalize things, but I think it has missed its chance,” he told Fox Business Network.

“My opinion is no rate hike this year,” he said.

Grant also thinks the economy isn’t as strong as it should be. “It seems to me we are more or less sleepwalking.  Certainly there’s nothing like the zest, nothing like the dynamism that one so often associated with America’s economy,” he explained.

“This has been an ultra-long business expansion, as lethargic as it has been, it has been a very long, live one.  They say expansions don’t die of old age, but to a degree they do.”

Investors are watching for clues on whether the Fed will raise interest rates next month. That would depend on its assessment of the resilience of the American economy, which impacts global growth. Speeches by several Fed members this week may give insights into what Fed policymakers might do at their meeting in June, the Associated Press reported.

It seems "market participants are pining for more clarity after the Fed minutes, released last week, indicated that most members are in favor of a rate hike in June if economic conditions continue to improve," Bernard Aw of IG said in a client note. "The market wants more affirmation on this, although I would think that the writing is clear enough and what we need is not more rhetoric but hard data."

Meanwhile, John Williams, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, said that the Fed is considering a June rate hike.

“We’re going to get a lot more data between now and our June meeting,” Williams told Yahoo Finance. “I do view June as a live meeting, in the sense that we are seriously considering at that meeting whether we should have the next rate hike. But it will depend also on the conversations we have in the meeting room itself.”

(Newsmax wire services contributed to this report).

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