Greg Ip, Chief Economics Commentator for The Wall Street Journal, thinks the Federal Reserve should cut its benchmark interest rates sooner rather than later. After all, he says, inflation is down to 2.6% and the unemployment rate stands at 4.1%.

I disagree. Ip makes much of the rate of inflation drop, from 4.3% then to an estimated 2.6% now, the steepest decline since 1984, and of the unemployment rate increase, to 4.1% from 3.6%, an increase seldom seen outside recessions.

Not so much. The inflation rate drop also is from its 9+% peak a couple years ago, and as Ip put it, the current rate is within shouting distance of the Fed’s goal of 2%. That much Ip has right; the difference now is economic noise. Regarding unemployment, 3.6% is historically consistent with a hot, inflationary labor market while 4.1% is historically consistent with a healthy economy. The rate of increase bears watching, but it doesn’t warrant action.

In fact, nothing in Ip’s article data warrant Fed action. The Fed’s current benchmark interest rates, between 5.25% and 5.5%, are entirely consistent, historically, with 2% inflation and 4-ish% unemployment. Actual economic fluctuations around those targets are normal and self-correcting.

Rather than cutting rates further, or dithering about when to cut—or to increase, an option the Fed also still is mumbling about—Powell and his Governors should stop the hand-wringing, and announce that they’re going to leave the rates alone for the foreseeable future because the economy has arrived. No further movement, in either direction, in the benchmarks is warranted.

The People’s Republic of China’s debt-fueled economic growth is threatening to hinder continued growth, even to cause serious contraction for the PRC’s economy. Much of that debt is local government off-the-books lending and, especially,

The deterioration of China’s real-estate market in the past three years meant local governments could no longer rely on land sales to real-estate developers, a significant source of revenue.

There’s another problem with that last, though, that makes off-the-books debt issuance even dicier for those local jurisdictions. The local governments own, or owned, only a finite amount of land, and so there is an upper bound to the amount they can sell to those developers. It’s very much akin to feudal Europe, where parents, over a very few generations would subdivide their land to give some to their eldest sons to use and profit from—and then ran out of land to subdivide. It was worse for the kings, who gave away royal lands to eldest sons and to nobles as rewards or loyalty purchases. The kings ran out of land, also.

Kings and local PRC governments could repossess those lands on one or another pretext, but such moves were, and are for the PRC governments, fraught with political danger. In the PRC’s case, the land limits, as much as any market for real estate, meant that borrowing against that collateral becomes even more risky, as the land collateral becomes smaller, along with the constructed buildings becoming expensive to hold on inventory pending sales that aren’t happening.