The high price of low interest rates

You’ll recall that I’ve railed for years against zero interest rates, which transplanted a cancerous marrow into the very bones of the financial system. Originally a novel emergency expedience to shore up a fiscal skeleton riddled with osteoporosis in 2008, effectively free money was allowed to persist for an improbable 14 years. Not to forget, bank rates also plummeted in 2002, barely recuperating to a modest 5 per cent at last when the spectre of the end of the world shoved rates smack down to nothing. Brief expedience slid to long-term crutch.

So we’ve really had two decades of central banks setting up lemonade stands on the corner: cups brimming with millions for five cents. Europe got downright dystopian with negative interest rates. I’ve long fantasised that if paying banks to take your money ever spread to the UK, I’d march to the teller with one of those ubiquitous blue Ikea bags and demand my deposit in cash. I’d have a hole in the garden at the ready.

Debtors from individuals to corporations to governments have gone on seemingly limitless spending sprees. Savers have been made to feel like fools. Anyone with a nest egg has been forced to put capital at risk in the shares casino or watch the stockpile steadily erode from inflation like a sandcastle in the rain. Remember that chilling acronym ‘Tina’? There is no alternative. But let’s quote David Bromberg: ‘A man should never gamble more than he can stand to lose.’ Plenty of people have been compelled to gamble what they can’t lose.

Paltry interest rates haven’t only been profoundly unjust – making a mockery of prudence, frugality and the old-fashioned habit of paying for stuff with money you’ve already made, while encouraging recklessness, profligacy and the terribly modern habit of buying stuff with money you may never earn.