Read between the lines and the Federal Reserve is admitting that it is lost. “Puzzled” might be a better word.

And while the stock market loves that idea because it means there probably won’t be as many interest rate hikes as expected this year, this situation isn’t good for America.

The Federal Reserve held its policy-making committee meeting this week and announced the results Wednesday. Here’s the gist of that meeting, in my own words.

Interest rates were left where they are at this meeting and the Fed looks more reluctant to raise them in the months ahead.

The problem is, the US economy is doing just fine, although not quite as fine as last year.

Why’s that a problem? Because the economy is doing just fine, that means inflation can’t be far behind and rates should be going up.

Why isn’t the Fed pushing rates higher? Because there are “crosscurrents,” says Fed chief Jerome Powell, which means that even though the economy is doing just fine there are things — including some unexplained things — that Powell probably finds disturbing.

What are those things? Powell mentioned the slow economies in other parts of the world, Brexit (Britain’s divorce from the European Union), and the government shutdown right here in the US. Left unsaid was the fact that our government might shut down again in just a couple of weeks.

Powell didn’t mention the most significant of those crosscurrents, namely the fact that the stock market throws a tantrum when the Fed raises interest rates and so, too, does President Trump.

It would be messy for the Fed president to admit that he’s watching Wall Street or listening to the president. So Powell fell back on all the other things while repeating — and I say it again, repeating — that the Fed is “data dependent” when it comes to its interest rate policy.

“The case for raising rates has eased somewhat,” Powell admitted during the press conference that came after the policy-making Federal Open Market Committee had adjourned.

The trouble with this is, there are always new data coming out. And if tomorrow’s report on job creation in the US turns out to be too strong, all that Powell said about being “data dependent” will slap him in the face.

There’s one other problem that the Fed has — and it’s a very big one.

Back in 2009, the Fed started printing fake money so that it could buy government bonds and keep interest rates extraordinarily and artificially low. That printing operation was called quantitative easing, and there were several versions of it.

When all was said and done, the government had purchased around $4 trillion in government bonds, bank debt and Treasury securities from 2009 to 2011.

As I said when this was happening — and many times afterward — the Fed never had a plan to get out of this fake-money situation. It never knew how to “quantitative tighten,” that is, sell all those trillions in securities without affecting the markets and the economy.

The Fed has started selling off those excess assets, something that the financial markets didn’t seem to like. On Wednesday, the Fed issued a separate statement backing off somewhat on that policy.

The Fed, it said, is “prepared to adjust any of the details for completing balance sheet normalization in light of economy and financial developments.”

Put another way, the Fed is like someone driving a car with a navigation system that keeps rerouting. It really doesn’t know if it is going in the right direction.

It is lost.