KEEP IN MIND IT'S AN OLD ONE

There's an addiction going on and it has little to do with street drugs although one might say in another way it has everything to do with a street drug.

It this case, it's a six-year addiction. And the drug of choice is low or near zero interest rates. While one of MSM's latest memes, besides the possibility of a Grexit, centers on when the Fed will start jacking up interest rates, it raises the issue of how far and for how long.

The second part of that question is, once started how many rate hikes will there be and over what time span? If history is any guide, taking the last 50 years or so, 26 months is the average once the hikes are underway. 

The last time the Fed started raising rates was 11 years ago. They stopped two years later. Most of us know what followed, a financial crisis.

One of the problems with addictions is they're difficult to break. With investors of all sorts scrambling for yield the past several years, there's a ton of leverage in these markets. A cynic might even describe it as "scary leverage."

To be sure there are enough white hat boys and girls around to suggest otherwise. One thing looks fairly certain, central bankers are either going to be terribly wrong or terribly correct. 

Those who believe the Fed will break the historical mode and tread more softly versus those who believe the Fed will return to business as usual so as not to toss any unexpected flies into the monetary ointment.

Business as usual just might turn out to be the exact opposite of what the market needs.

Just last week John Williams, head honcho at the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank, a member some think is Chairwoman Janet Yellen's interest rate clone, warned that the time for higher rates is "closer and closer."

Anyone who pretends to know just how the market in general and investors in particular will react is doing just that, pretending. Keep in mind the S&P 500 suffered only one big break last October when it briefly--and that's the key term here, briefly--dipped below its 200-day moving average.

Keep in mind the S&P 500 eked out a small gain today to close at a record for the second time this year. Keep in mind despite all the hand-wringing about Greece and the Ukraine, there appears to be a large amount of complacency around.

If this were a three-card street shell game, one could say the marks are lining up. Just when they all get in place, well, we'll have to wait and see.