Standing on the Brink of Insanity

Recessions occur when people choose to save money instead of spending it. Recessions can be good things. They give large economies a chance to "take out the trash" as under performing businesses fail they are removed from the market and as financial crimes are more easily discovered/less easily ignored. At the same time, lots of people loose their jobs and their wages tend to drop during this time. A lot of countries fall into a recession and then have a hard time getting themselves back out of it. The way to fix a recession is to get people to start spending money again. Banks try to facilitate this through the lowering interest rates. Since the housing bubble burst in 2008, interest rates in the US and around the world have stayed around 0% and they have been this way for almost a decade. In December, the Federal Reserve decided that they would start to rise interest rates. The Feds plan to increase rates gradually so that at the end of the year the rate has increased by 1. This is planned to last 3 years.
The debate is not whether this is actually going to happen, the debate is over whether the American economy can actually handle it. The Feds seem to think so but investors aren't so sure. Other countries have actually tried to raise interest rates from above 0 before but it did not work out the way that it was suppose to. They all rose interest rates but after a while, the growth that they had seen before started to slow down shoving those countries back to where they were before. Every country ended up having to go back to the 0% rates that they had had previously. The fear is that this is going to happen to the US and the possibility of it is not making investors happy. I imagine, this news is not looking very good to other countries as well. Because the global economies are so interconnected, the US economy taking a downturn would have impossibly negative impact on all of these other countries whose economies are already struggling. If this goes wrong another global economic meltdown could very well be in our cards which would not be good at all for anyone let alone new college grads. How can you pay back your student loans if you can't get a job? You can't.

That is some drop

 If they did not try to raise interest rates, the economy would basically be defenseless against inflation or another economic downturn. You can not have the rates at 0 for forever. The system just was not designed to work that way so hopefully the American economy is strong enough to handle what could possibly be a step towards normal.
Fed Raises Key Interest Rate for First Time in Almost a Decade