OVERSTRETCHED

So the Brussels bureaucrats granted Greece four months to show its true economic colors.

Not that Greece shouldn't have been granted the time, it most likely won't matter, but does anyone think it will really make a difference?  Meanwhile, the market celebrates. That's a pretty thin margin to get all bubbly about.

If there's anything more in the news than deflation it has to be the Janet Yellen circus and interest rates hikes. Central banks have flooded the world with easy money and now Ms Big is about to finally remove the punch bowl.

Once again kudos to Financial Times writer James Mackintosh's "Short View" for calling a lexicographer a lexicographer, apparently a person the Fed doesn't have on staff.

"For lexicographers specializing in central bank-speak, yesterday was a big day," Mackintosh writes. "Janet Yellen, chairwoman of the US Federal Reserve, defined what the Fed means by 'patient': not raising rates for the next two meeting."

Bill Clinton fans will love Yellen for taking a page from the former president's definition of "is" being pretty much what members of the elite class say it is. On this stage Yellen's an elite player, fumbling and stumbling with the purse strings of real people.

So perhaps a bit more bureaucratic confusion is okay. But then again maybe it isn't.

"We have to be forward looking," she noted. "We have highly accommodative policy that has been in place for some time." Yet most of the indicators she and her band of merry bankers use are backward looking.  "Data dependent" is rear view mirror.

The first rate hike won't amount to much. As Mackintosh points out, what's important is the market's perception of the trend. In other words, as in past examples will there be a series of consecutive hikes.

We use the tern examples euphemistically as in past mistakes.

The most hated firm on the planet, Walmart, just hiked wages. Look for the next retail shoe to fall of a lemmings-see-a-lemmings do. The dot plot may misconstrue all those part-timers--firms for obvious reasons love--who actually want full time work.

We had to hazard a guess, once interest rates strart up, the Fed will error on the overdone side and that should cause to think about start placing your portfolio on what's cheap now versus what's, to use a kind term, overstretched.