Can’t help thinking I don’t blame you.
Raising interest rates help some folks. It hurts everyone else.
A five percent rate rise would cost the federal government $91.66 billion dollars a month on the current national debt. That would be $1.1 trillion dollars per year.
The government just cut personal and small business taxes. That would be eaten up and more by a 5% interest rate rise.
Business expansion would turn into remain in place or contraction. Businesses bringing jobs back to the U. S. would stop.
We all would pay 5% higher rates on all of our debt.
Yes, I’d like to see higher rates on my savings, but it would all be eaten up by higher rates and costs on everything I spend money on.
I don’t honestly know how to resolve this issue. I know that you would like to see the rate near the inflation rate. I think the inflation rate is much higher than that used to calculate the SS COLA.
If you raise the rates to the inflation rate, guess what happens to the inflation rate the next year. That becomes a vicious cycle.
I don’t think of going back to the days of Jimmy Carter to be an ideal goal.
Current FED is doing an admirable job in raising rates at deliberately slow and orderly fashion. I am in my late 70’s, and have seen FED rates increased much faster.
What the modestly higher rates by FED will do is build tools available to counter-act when next recession actually hits, by HAVING ROOM TO LOWER RATES. I do not support big jumps in interest rates. But modest rate increases are necessary to reduce the hard asset bubbles existing currently. That will avoid a big bang crash or depression later.
Europe has it’s tit in the ringer because they have near zero (negative in some countries) rates already, and have nothing left to stimulate the economy in the form of lower rates, except go more and more in debt, just like Japan has been doing.
If rates can not be increased during lowest unemployment periods, there never is going to be a more opportune time.
The retired folks on fixed income have been suffering for more than 10 yrs now. Used to be you could retire with $1million dollars in retirement and live well off of the interest. Not the case at all anymore