I am curious, why do you think lower interest rates are bad for an average person?
Of course, this is just one way that interest rates affect the economy, and it's important to bear in mind that lower interest rates can also stimulate investment which help to create jobs for average people as well.
Precisely! Yet the big problem in the Anglosphere is that most of that money has been invested in asset accumulation, namely housing, causing a massive housing crisis in these countries.
Youre implying the country exerting financial responsibility to control inflation isn’t good.
Not using interest rates to control inflation caused the stagflation crisis of the 70s, and ended when Volcker set rates to 20%.
People like my parents, who are both 65, could just park their money at a local bank and have an FDIC-insured savings instrument that roughly tracks inflation and helps invest in the local economy. They don't have to worry about cokeheads in lower Manhattan making bets that endanger their retirements like they have numerous times.
If they do that with lower interest rates, they're more likely to lose money instead of preserving it or slightly increasing it. Which, of course, gives the cokeheads more money to gamble with.
This is why in a hot economy we raise rates, and in a not economy we lower them
(oversimplification, but it is a commonly provided explanation)
Not necessarily. Sure, it that money is chasing fixed assets like housing but if that money was invested into production of things to consume its not necessarily inflation inducing is it? For example, if that money went into expanding the electricity grid and production of electric cars, the pool of goods to be consumed is expanding so there is less likelihood of inflation.
People are paid salaries to work at these production facilities, which means they have more money to spend, and the competition drives people to be willing to spend more to get the outputs. Not all outputs will be scaled, those that aren't experience inflation, like food and housing today
Another way to look at this: Low interest rates can induce demand and drive inflation. But they also control the rates when financing supply-side production; so they can also ramp up supply to meet increased demand.
1. Not all goods and services are like this, obviously. Real estate is the big one that low interest rates will continue to inflate. We need legislative-side solutions to this, ideally focused at the state and local levels.
2. None of this applies if you have an economy culturally resistant to consumerism, like Japan. Everything flips on its head and things get weird. But that's not the US.
This means stocks will return less in low rates environment unless there is a lot of additional growth.
> Low interest rates make borrowing cheap, so companies flood money into real estate and stocks
also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_Unit...