The Federal Reserve's nine straight interest rate increases since June 2004 failed to change one fact: Money is still on sale in America.

It's been at least 32 years since a Fed effort to raise the benchmark interest rate has had such little effect, a Goldman, Sachs & Co. index shows. Consumers can still buy washing machines and computers with zero-interest loans, or homes with mortgage rates near four-decade lows.

"The Fed is not gaining traction," says Lyle Gramley, a former Fed governor who is now a senior economics adviser to the Stanford Washington Group in Washington. The central bank has "to keep tightening monetary policy."

Chairman Alan Greenspan, who joined the Fed 18 years ago this week, and other policymakers are likely to extend their drive to head off faster inflation with the 10th straight increase in the nation's benchmark rate. They will lift the overnight lending rate a quarter-point to 3.5 percent today, according to the unanimous forecast of 78 economists in a Bloomberg News survey.

The economy is accelerating, with reports for July showing the biggest job gains since April, a pickup in manufacturing and the second-best month ever for automobile sales.

"The Fed is running just to stand still," says Jeffrey Trester, an adviser to the Philadelphia Fed from 2002 to 2004 and founder of price-comparison Web site Pricescan.com.

The rate increases "haven't substantially raised long-term mortgage rates, nor have they slowed spending or slowed the economy."

Wall Street's 22 biggest bond-trading firms are almost unanimous in predicting the Fed will raise rates at least three more times this year, according to a Bloomberg survey.

"They are going to tighten through the balance of the year, which will bring the Fed funds rate to 4.25 percent or at least 4 percent," says Michael Darda, chief economist at MKM Partners LP in Greenwich, Connecticut. "Monetary policy is accommodative at current levels."

The Fed is trying to head off faster inflation. Its preferred measure, the personal consumption expenditure index excluding food and energy, rose at a 1.9 percent rate for the year that ended in June. That's close to the 2 percent high of the Fed's forecast range for 2005.

When inflation was a threat in 1994, the central bank raised interest rates 3 percentage points in 12 months in a cycle that included three half-point boosts and the only 0.75 percentage point increase of Greenspan's tenure.

Today, with the economy expanding with moderate gains in employment and inflation, "the Fed is gradually raising interest rates," says Alan Meltzer, a professor and author of a history of the Fed.

But borrowing costs have stayed low in part because yields on 10-year Treasury notes, the benchmark for many loans, including mortgages, fell even as the Fed raised its overnight lending rate. The yield was 4.42 percent today compared with 4.69 percent in June 2004 and was below 4 percent less than six weeks ago.

Consumers are taking advantage of low mortgage rates to tap their real-estate equity.

The long-term mortgage rate averaged 5.82 percent last week, Freddie Mac said, down from 5.99 percent a year earlier.