Are Interest Rates Artificially Low? Nope.
Discouraging:
The Meme is Out There, by Paul Krugman: I just answered some questions for Princeton magazine, and among them was this:
Please comment on how artificially low interest rates have impacted the current value of baby boomers’ retirement portfolios and should this be a consideration of the Federal Reserve?I don’t blame the editor, who after all isn’t supposed to be an economist. But what this must reflect is what people are hearing on the financial news; I’m pretty sure that a lot of people think that all the experts regard interest rates as “artificially low”, and have no idea that to the extent that such a notion makes any sense at all — which is to say in terms of the Wicksellian natural rate — interest rates are too high, not too low.
Posted by Mark Thoma on Saturday, July 12, 2014 at 12:15 PM in Economics, Monetary Policy |
Permalink
Comments (71)