Rates may not be as high as they were several months ago or as low as they were 5 weeks ago, but they're close enough to either boundary that the threat (or promise) of returning is palpable. For at least the past 2 weeks, we'd been waiting for this week's events to give us some sort of push higher or lower, but it looks like the waiting will continue. The two key events in question were Tuesday's release of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) and Wednesday's Fed Announcement.  CPI is the most widely followed inflation metric among regularly scheduled economic reports.  It comes out once a month and has had a huge impact on rates many times over the past 2 years.  This time around, it happened to be scheduled to come out a day before a particularly important Fed policy announcement. Year-over-year CPI was destined to continue falling in this week's report simply because it was so high 13 months ago (i.e. it's a 12 month calculation and there was no way the current month would be as bad as the month that just got bumped out of the equation). Month-over-month numbers filter out the impact of the past and show more detail.  This is where we see the first stalemate that went unresolved this week.  Simply put, month-over-month inflation remained perfectly inside the increasingly narrow sideways range that's been intact for almost 2 years.  This offered precious little guidance for the Fed announcement the following day.