Interest rates will continue to hover around the 'zero' mark as the Federal Reserve officials saw little reason to warrant an increase.

With economic recovery on a sluggish path Chairman Ben Bernanke and his colleagues are await a significant increase in employment along with some measure of stability followed by strengthening in the housing sector, before returning to higher lending rates.

In the view of Joseph Stiglitz, a noted luminary in the field of Economics and Nobel Laureate, "The withdrawal of the support risks increasing the interest rate, increasing the number of foreclosures and exacerbating the strain, the stress that American families are already facing".

The American economy, which has seen job losses amounting to 8.4 million since the housing sector collapse in December 2007 and plunged the nation in its worst recession since the Great Depression, is at present in the opinion of Fed officials at a very sensitive point. Withdrawing support at a stage when the job market was just stabilizing could deliver a decided setback to the current progress made on the road to economic recovery.

This decision resulted in the strengthening of both the Dow Jones Industrial Average index along with the NASDAQ composite.