Almost on cue, Americans step up to the plate at this time of year and swat a barrage of home runs for the nation’s retailers. It’s an awesome display of firepower, even though it creates suspicions that consumers are on steroids, or at least credit cards.

For merchants, the holiday season creates a lion’s share of profits. At this point, unfortunately, they are complaining that consumers are hitting an abundance of ground balls, but few round-trippers. The result has been anxious discounting, as Wall Street grumbles that the merchants are giving away the store.

Get ready for Monday’s report of November retail sales to raise additional concerns. Chicago economist Brian Wesbury is looking for a tiny gain of 0.1 percent, or, when auto sales are excluded, 0.3 percent. That hardly seems like the stuff of boom times.

But things may not be as bleak as the numbers indicate, said Wesbury, of Griffin, Kubik, Stephens & Thompson, an investment firm.

“For one thing, it has been very difficult to track Internet sales, even though they seem to be growing two or three times as fast as sales in brick-and-mortar stores,” he said.

When all factors are considered, retail sales are running more than 6 percent ahead of year-ago levels, Wesbury said.

“Don’t forget that more and more people are buying gift cards and gift certificates,” he said. “It’s a nationwide trend. It may help to explain why, in recent years, many stores have reported more holiday sales in the days right after Christmas than before.”

It’s decision time Tuesday for policy-makers of the Federal Reserve, who will gather to discuss the next move for interest rates.

Economists are nearly unanimous that the central bankers will push the bellwether short-term rate upward by a quarter-point, to 2.25 percent. The question is whether they will continue to tighten credit in 2005, especially in light of so-so job growth.

Economist Lynn Reaser says members of the Fed will, indeed, engineer a quarter-point move in the short rate, while making “little or no change in their assessment of conditions, indicating that inflation remains well contained.”

Looking ahead to next year, she expects 2005 to finish with a short-term rate around 3percent, as members of the Fed “continue to believe a gradual approach is appropriate.”

Eventually, Reaser expects the rate to rise to around 4 percent, which would be considered neutral, “unless the economy heats up very sharply, or members of the Fed perceive another soft spot.”

While the dollar has sagged against foreign currencies, investors have managed to overlook weakness in overseas economies, which are doing worse than our own.

Expect a slight uptick for the greenback Tuesday, with the report on the October trade deficit. A month earlier, the shortfall fell to $51.6 billion from $53.5 billion in August.

Despite that glimmer of hope, the trade chasm has been so enormous this year – approaching $600 billion – that it has ignited gloom in all quarters.

On Thursday, watch for renewed talk about a real estate bubble with the report on November housing starts. A month earlier, starts surged 6.4 percent to a 2.03 million-unit annual rate, setting the industry up for a record year. But skeptics are wondering whether the 13 percent year-over-year leap in house prices in the third quarter offers a portent that the residential market soon will be running on empty.

The big mystery for the stock market is why a drop of nearly 25 percent in the price of oil hasn’t set off a foot-stomping rally on Wall Street. Equities continue to drift, with less than three weeks left for 2004 to show meaningful gains.

Flossmoor, Ill., investment manager Richard Evans, who tracks groups of stocks in a search for what will happen next, says investors shouldn’t give up.

So far, the bull market “is being given lip service by all,” he says in his latest Renaissance Report newsletter. “However, participation remains relatively limited. The lift-off and speculative phases of the market are still ahead.”