Last Saturday night, if you wondered whether the Federal Reserve would cut interest rates and you checked CME FedWatch, which follows the futures market for predictive value, you would have seen a 96% chance of a 25-basis-point cut. That was 200 basis points lower than a similar check a few days earlier.

What might make this seem odd is that the Consumer Price Index report for November showed an increase of 2.7%. October also showed rising inflation. Cutting rates would seem the opposite of what the Fed might have been expected to do, keeping things steady.

The reason, according to ABC News interviews with experts, is that even with another cut, rates remain “historically high.” "I don't think the recent inflation has diverged enough from what the Fed expected to change its outlook," said William English, a Yale University finance professor and former Fed official to ABC News. After the previous cuts, the federal funds rate ranges between 4.50% and 4.75%.