The Federal Reserve is expected to lay the groundwork today for its first interest rate hike in nearly a decade, as it continues to weigh whether the U.S. recovery can hold up against collapsing oil prices and a soaring dollar, Reuters reported.

The policy will likely discard a pledge to remain “patient” before hiking rates, trimming one of the final verbal cues it used through crisis, recession and recovery to describe its intent to keep rates near zero for a period of time.

Maybe all of the attention to Fed musings is a waste of time.

MarketWatch cited Michael Batnick of the Irrelevant Investors blog, who said all the Fed hoopla is “the mother lode of noise.”

“The financial community is hung up on whether the Fed will remove the word ‘patience’ at its meeting tomorrow,” Batnick said. “Whether we’re obsessing over patience or something else, the Fed meetings, while entertaining, have really failed to live up to the hype.”

He points out that over the last 40 Fed meetings, the change in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index was 0.24 percent and the intraday swing was above average during 22 of those meetings, amounting to “basically a coin flip.”

Regardless of how the markets shake out over the course of the day, the S&P 500, Dow Jones industrial average and the Nasdaq composite were all trading down at 9:20 a.m. Iowa time.