What my thinking had been before was that the Fed would never raise rates if there was no inflation. Now I'm thinking that the fed may still be concerned about deflation and wish it still had the capacity to lower rates --thus they wish they could set them higher now --just in case-- so long as the rate hike didn't hurt anything.
This talk about the 'soft' economy means any rate hike would probably be a disaster --both to production and to prices.
IIRC, Mark Haines, late of CNBC, often used the term “Don’t fight the Fed.”