Why Artificially Low Rates Are Bad for You, by Daniel Lacalle

Perpetually suppressed interest rates are a lot like a diet of junk food and candy. It may taste good for a while, but eventually it will make you sick. From Daniel Lacalle at dlacalle.com:

The disastrous era of negative rates may be ending, but it is not over. Imposing negative nominal and real rates is a colossal error that has only encouraged excessive indebtedness and the zombification of the economy. However, nominal rates may be rising, but real rates remain deeply negative. In other words, rates are still exceptionally low for the level of inflation we have.

Negative interest rates are the destruction of money, an economic aberration based on the idea that rates are too high and that is why economic agents do not invest or take the amount of credit that central planners desire.

The excuse for implementing negative rates is based on a fallacy: that central banks lower rates because markets demand it and policy makers only respond to that demand, they do not impose it. If that were the case, why not let the rates fluctuate freely if the result is going to be the same? Because it is a false premise.

Imposing artificially low rates is the ultimate form of interventionism. Depressing the price of risk is a subsidy to reckless behaviour and excessive debt.

Why is it bad for everyone to keep negative rates?

Continue reading→

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.