Release of the minutes of the latest Federal Open Market Committee meeting and stepped up commentary by Federal Reserve Chairman Janet Yellen touched off a new spate of speculation about when the Fed will act to raise interest rates and what effect its action or continued restraint will have on financial markets.

Richard Harris, CEO of Port Shelter Investment Management, told CNBC that the Fed will not raise rates this year and the stock market rally will continue. He accepts the Fed as "data-dependent" but finds "they just don't want to move; maybe in December. The answer to that analysis is that the markets are going to continue to go up."

As markets anticipate another speech by Yellen, Harris considered whether the Yellen honeymoon "is finally coming to an end." On the Fed's efforts to communicate its intentions, Harris said, "The problem is that their intent seems to change with every meeting, and the longer this goes on, the worse it's going to get."

This writer sees this assessment as consistent with a cynical view that the Fed is going to continue to put off action, in large part because Wall Street has developed a dependence on accommodative policy, so that the Fed will not take away the proverbial punch bowl, nor will it be able to deliver a smooth transition to higher rates. The CNBC interviewer wondered aloud what data the Fed is "dependent" on, and one is reminded of the remark by Charles Plosser, former president of the Philadelphia Fed that the Fed lacks good enough data to inform its policies.

Next, Peter Cardillo, chief market economist at Rockwell Global Capital, and Andrew Freris, CEO of Ecognosis Advisory, discussed why the Fed continues to hold off on raising rates. Cardillo said that the interpretation of the minutes as "neutral" just means that the Fed is "on hold until September, maybe December, because the global economy continues to weaken." Cardillo noted that the Fed disagrees with those who expect consumers to spend the gains they are receiving from low oil prices.

Meanwhile, Hans-Werner Sinn, president of Ifo Institute, observed that Greece is insolvent and asked why the authorities delay acknowledging this fact. This writer would refer to a recent warning by International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde about continuing risk of asset fire sales. Lingering questions remain as to where these exposures might be, what interventions the Fed and Treasury might undertake and why the authorities persist, despite rhetoric to the contrary, in the same regulatory policies that have caused pervious episodes of the financial crisis.

Ashok Shah, investment director at London & Capital, argued that "the chances of an interest rate crisis continue to be pushed out, so there are still opportunities to seek out value in all of the asset classes." He added that, "The Fed needs to prepare the market for the eventual rate crisis, even though it will be long in coming." Shah added, "There is going to be volatility down the line, a year from now perhaps."

This writer would point out that investors who have left the party early have been wrong, and one wonders whether investors realize that in spite of a discordant note Yellen sounded in the Lagarde interview that the market probably misinterpreted for a day, the Fed continues to sponsor this market and can be expected to intervene forcefully if the crash some pundits have predicted for years actually occurs. A modest way to put this is merely to note, as some commentators have from time to time, that the authorities have entered uncharted territory in response to the 2008 crisis from which the country has never fully recovered.