Washington ? The Federal Reserve is expected to nudge interest rates up for a fourth time this year today, acting on the belief that the economy finally has emerged from an extended “soft patch.”

And the November rate increase likely will be followed by another quarter-point advance at the Fed’s Dec. 14 meeting, with more rate increases to come in 2005, analysts say.

The forecast represents a change in thinking from just a week ago, when many were predicting that the Fed would raise rates this month before pausing to assess the effect on the economy of its credit-tightening campaign.

What changed the forecast was the far better-than-expected employment report for October that showed the nation’s businesses adding 337,000 workers last month, the biggest one-month gain in seven months and more than double what had been forecast.

“We are certainly out of the soft patch, and I think the economy is getting on firmer ground,” said Sung Won Sohn, chief economist at Wells Fargo in Minneapolis.

The Fed and Alan Greenspan, its chairman, started raising interest rates last June with the federal funds rate — the interest that banks charge on overnight loans — at a 46-year low of 1 percent. The three quarter-point rate hikes in June, August and September have pushed the funds rate to 1.75 percent.

Banks’ prime lending rate — the benchmark for millions of consumer and business loans — has risen to 4.75 percent from 4 percent in June, which had been the lowest level since 1958.

A move Wednesday would put the prime rate at 5 percent — still well below the 9.5 percent level for the prime rate in early 2001, shortly before the Fed began an aggressive easing campaign to deal with the shocks of a bursting stock market bubble and the 2001 recession.

The federal funds rate stood at 6.5 percent before the Fed’s first rate cut in January of 2001, but analysts doubt that the Fed will be aiming for rates that high in its current credit-tightening campaign.