I don’t usually get up early just for an appointment at a bank. Yet last Tuesday in New York, I lost sleep in order to slam a trove of savings into a certificate of deposit. Surely I could have delayed the quotidian chore for any old day. What was the hurry? I wanted to ensure that the cash would earn a Great Big Two Per Cent.
As expected, the next day the Federal Reserve, America’s central bank, made its second 0.25 per cent interest rate cut in three months. More cuts are to come — though starting from a miserable 1.75 per cent, it won’t take much whittling before we’re bang on zero.
Pre-millennium, rushing to lock in funds at a squalid 2 per cent interest rate would have been the stuff of low-grade fiscal nightmares. But after the dotcom bubble burst, the Fed rate plummeted from about 6.5 in 2000 to 1 per cent in 2003.
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