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People 'demand' the opportunity to gamble away money they do not have, just like people 'demand' money from loan sharks at extortionate interest rates. This is a warped, empty type of freedom, in which the powerful are free to exploit the vulnerable.
To investors, job creation is a second-order effect. Market participants care first about interest rates, exchange rates, bond prices and the one great factor that affects all three: the long-term solvency of a bond company called the U.S. government.
I can't tell you how much debt I took on to attend New York University because, at the time, I didn't care to notice. And besides, what teenager has a clue about interest rates? What I can tell you is that by my mid-20s, I owed somewhere around $50,000.
I'm not an economist, but I have spent time around thousands of small-business owners and investors, and I remain skeptical - despite the best intentions of the Fed - that even lower interest rates can make a meaningful dent in our unemployment problem.
The older you are when you buy an annuity, the shorter your life expectancy will be - so the greater a monthly paycheck the same sum of money will buy you. When interest rates are higher, the size of the paycheck for the same sum of money will rise also.
I was in oil when oil was $8 a barrel and in construction when interest rates were 20 percent. I was looking for something everyone used and where you could build a customer base - and if it was successful, you could take it nationwide and even worldwide.
Paying interest on reserve balances enables the Fed to break the strong link between the quantity of reserves and the level of the federal funds rate and, in turn, allows the Federal Reserve to control short-term interest rates when reserves are plentiful.
With interest rates rising, gold doesn't pay an interest rate, but every other currency - it becomes not only less important to hold gold as an alternative, but more expensive to hold it as an insurance policy and so that will be a burden on the price of gold.
For highly indebted governments, low interest rates are critical to keep debt levels sustainable and ease pressure to restructure debt and recapitalize banks. The shift to a high sovereign-debt-yield equilibrium would make it impossible to achieve fiscal balance.
The Obama administration deserves credit for quickly ending the housing free fall. In particular, Obama empowered the Federal Housing Administration to ensure that households could find mortgages at low interest rates even during the worst phase of the financial panic.
In 1936, money had no important role. Interest rates were one-eighth of one-eighth of one per cent. I did some research, and I found that the interest on one million dollars of ninety-day Treasuries was $37. People didn't even bother to collect it. The Fed wasn't important.
I studied what happened in the bond and the stock markets during previous periods when the Fed stopped manipulating the bond market. In every single case, the moment the Fed announced that there would be a cessation of intervention, stocks declined and interest rates went up.
By putting downward pressure on interest rates, the Fed is trying to make financial conditions more accommodative - supporting asset values and lower borrowing costs for households and businesses and thus encouraging the spending that spurs job creation and a stronger recovery.
For people who grew up in the last four decades of the 20th century, it is hard to grasp the concept of negative interest rates. How is it even possible? If interest rates are the price of money, is the marketplace broadcasting that money is on sale? Are we just giving it away?
I'm the guy pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan. With negative interest rates throughout the world, it's the greatest opportunity to rebuild everything. Shipyards, ironworks, get them all jacked up. We're just going to throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks.
Greece will not manage to get back on its feet without restructuring its debt. There is no way around it. The country's creditors will have to reduce a portion of its debts by extending maturity dates, lowering interest rates or giving them what's called a 'haircut' in financial jargon.
When people retire, their income drops much more sharply than their consumption. As a result, they stop saving and start drawing down the assets they've acquired during their high-saving years. That could start to put upward pressure on interest rates and downward pressure on stock prices.
I will say this: the central banks can actually support growth beyond a point. When there is no inflation, they can cut interest rates, and that is the way they support growth, but if you cut interest rate to the bone, there is nothing more to cut. It is very hard to support growth beyond that.
It's one of the fundamental principles of the stock market: When interest rates go up, stocks go down. And along with financial companies and cyclicals, technology companies - with their sky-high price-to-earnings multiples - should be among the biggest losers in an environment of rising rates.
I mean, I'm a conservative. I believe that, you know, if you borrow too much, you just build up debts for your children to pay off. You put pressure on interest rates. You put at risk your economy. That's the case in Britain. We're not a reserve currency, so we need to get on and deal with this issue.
If the U.S. Government was a company, the deficit would be $5 trillion because they would have to account by general accepted accounting principles. But actually they encourage government spending, reckless government spending, because the government can issue Treasury bills at extremely low interest rates.
A number of non-banking finance companies have entered the rural microcredit market. Many microcredit agencies have been charging interest rates not very dissimilar to those charged by moneylenders. Borrowing then becomes more to meet pressing consumption needs, rather than for farming or small-scale enterprises.
The reality is that business and investment spending are the true leading indicators of the economy and the stock market. If you want to know where the stock market is headed, forget about consumer spending and retail sales figures. Look to business spending, price inflation, interest rates, and productivity gains.
The market needs to set prices, including interest rates and allocate resources. If it were up to me, we would abolish the Fed and return to the gold standard. Absent that, the Fed should be completely removed from the political sphere, its dual mandate replaced by a single mission to provide the nation with sound money.
The Fed contributed to the financial crisis, keeping interest rates too low for too long. I give them credit for responding and stabilizing the economy and the financial sector during the crisis. But then they tried to do too much with quantitative easing that went on forever, just dramatically exploding their balance sheets.
We don't know what our health care costs are going to be. We don't know what our tax rates are going to be. We don't know what our interest rates are going to be. We don't know what our energy costs are going to be. All these uncertainties are being driven by the Government's agenda. What we really need to do is get Government to step back.
Credit card companies are jacking up interest rates, lowering credit limits, and closing accounts - and people who have made timely payments are not exempt. So even if you pay off your balance - and that's tough when interest rates are insanely high - there's a good chance your credit limit will be slashed, and that will hurt your FICO score.
The Fed should make a clear commitment to stable money to reduce the swings in interest rates and inflation. Instead, it champions and flaunts unstable money. This encourages momentum trading and the growth of derivatives. Meanwhile, layers of financial regulation make Washington bigger and more powerful but don't fix the underlying problems.
And that's the one thing that people do not understand is that we have very low interest rates and if those go back to historical levels or even go back to scary thoughts that they're back in the late '70s, early '80s, then that's going to really be hard to actually pay off those debts. It's going to be a - it's going to be a very big problem.
A higher IOER rate encourages banks to raise the interest rates they charge, putting upward pressure on market interest rates regardless of the level of reserves in the banking sector. While adjusting the IOER rate is an effective way to move market interest rates when reserves are plentiful, federal funds have generally traded below this rate.