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 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,” a former Fed governor who is now a senior economic adviser to the Stanford Washington Research Group, Lyle Gramley, said. The central bank has “to keep tightening monetary policy.”

Chairman Alan Greenspan, who joined the Fed 18 years ago this week, and other policy makers 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% today, according to the unanimous forecast of 70 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,” an adviser to the Philadelphia Fed from 2002 to 2004 and founder of price comparison Web site Pricescan.com, Jeffrey Trester, said. 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 separate Bloomberg survey published yesterday.

“They are going to tighten through the balance of the year, which will bring the Fed funds rate to 4.25% or at least 4%,” the chief economist at MKM Partners LP, Michael Darda, said. “Monetary policy is accommodative at current levels.”

Financial conditions haven’t been this loose after 13 months of a Fed tightening cycle since at least 1973, according to the Goldman Sachs Financial Conditions Index. The index examines data ranging from the trade-weighted value of the dollar and American stock prices to short-term interest rates.

The index shows that with the Fed’s overnight rate at 3.25% today, financial conditions are about unchanged from June 2004, when the rate stood at 1%. Typically a 13-month cycle of increases would have tightened conditions by about 1 percentage point, the firm says.

The Fed’s so-called measured pace of rate increase shows the 79-year-old Mr. Greenspan’s preference for moving against risks that could move the economy away from stable growth and full employment, a professor of political economics at Carnegie Mellon University and author of a history of the Fed, Allan Meltzer, said.

“He has run the most counter-cyclical policy in history,” Mr. Meltzer says. “People who criticize him for being too loose too long would have criticized him for tightening too fast.”

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% rate for the year that ended in June. That’s close to the 2% 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 during 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,” Mr. Meltzer says. The inflation-adjusted overnight rate stands at 1.25% after 13 months of rate increases. In early 1995, the so-called real federal funds rate stood at 3% after 13 months of increases.

Borrowing costs 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 fell to 4.39% on August 5 from 4.69% in June 2004 and was below 4% less than six weeks ago.

“This is the only postwar tightening cycle when long-term rates have fallen,” the chief fixed-income strategist for Deutsche Bank Securities LLC in New York, Joseph LaVorgna, wrote in an August 4 note to clients. The firm produces a financial-conditions index that shows the same trend as the Goldman Sachs index.

The Fed’s go-slow policy unleashed a consumption and housing boom financed by retailers and banks. Banks are easing lending standards for both mortgage and commercial borrowers, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency said in a report released July 28.