Plenty of suspense is building ahead of the Federal Reserve’s decision on interest rates next week. But don’t expect much drama to unfold in the bond or mortgage market, no matter when the Fed elects to lift rates for the first time since 2006.

There’s a good chance that the Treasury market will greet the move with a shrug, mortgage rates will stay steady and potential homebuyers will find little reason to alter their plans.

That’s the view of Doug Duncan, chief economist for Fannie Mae (FNMA), the mortgage-finance company that sits at the junction of capital markets and the housing economy.

For more than a year, he and his economics team have been expecting the Fed’s “liftoff” to occur this month, as the labor market tightened up and domestic economic conditions stayed generally firm.

With the recent bout of financial-market turbulence based mostly on global-growth concerns, though, “The odds of an increase have shrank,” Duncan says in the attached video interview.

While Duncan hasn’t formally changed his forecast for a small boost in short-term rates by Fed policy makers on Sept. 17, he concedes, “One of the questions that they have to answer is how much of the market volatility is a result of the anticipation of them making a move.”

Expectations for a Fed hike built into futures prices suggest there’s still only something like 30% chance assigned to a September move. If the Fed wants market expectations more aligned with its policy intentions before a rate change, “then you would make the argument that they’ll put it off,” Duncan adds.

A Wall Street Journal interview with San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank president John Williams highlighted the market and economic headwinds that look to make the September decision a cliffhanger.

Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs economists this week affirmed their forecast for a December move - with the risk tilted even later than that - given equivocal economic data and a broad tightening of financial conditions in recent weeks.

While the investor debate features forceful views on both sides, Duncan figures the stakes are relatively low when it comes to the outlook for real-world borrowing costs and appetites.

When and if the Fed nudges overnight interest rates a bit, Duncan thinks the short end of the Treasury curve will show modest gains in yields, and the long end “won’t move much.” Fannie Mae’s forecast for the 30-year fixed mortgage rate at the end of 2016 is 4.3%. That’s up a bit from current prevailing rates just under 3.9%, but hardly enough of a rise to alter home sales or prices significantly.

This suggests that there won’t likely be an urgent stampede of consumers trying to lock in low rates either ahead of a Fed rate hike or just afterward.

Duncan says the Fed has prolonged this period of low borrowing rates to get the consumer balance sheet back in shape, and has largely been successful.

“Our view is that over the last three or four years, the whole policy focus of the Fed was to make it amenable for households to refinance and improve cash flow and to give support to their house prices and the wealth effect,” he says. “So in terms of people rushing into the market, it’s hard to suggest that they haven’t had lots of opportunities to act on that if they’re financially capable.”

If so, then the recent trend of slow, steady improvement in the housing market should persist, supported by favorable demographics and constrained supply of new homes – yet without a new boom, or a frenzy of consumers trying to time the mortgage market.