Posted on 06/17/2016 9:59:42 AM PDT by Lorianne
Looking to dazzle friends and family at the next summer barbecue? Well, drop this little fact on them: global interest rates are at their lowest in 5,000 years.
Not only that, you can tell the acquaintance who brags about his gold bars in the bank vault that returns on commodities are the worst since 1933. Sounds crazy you may say, but that’s just the kind of history Bank of America Merrill Lynch rolled out in the third edition of “Longest Pictures” note.
The first chart shows the lowest global interest rates going all the way back to 3,000 B.C. Michael Hartnett, chief investment strategist, and his team at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, say that’s down to a combination of quantitative easing, zero interest-rate policies and negative interest-rate policies. That means borrowing costs are lower than what was on offer at the time of the Pharaohs of the First Dynasty of Egypt (3,000 B.C.) to Napoleon through to Alexander Hamilton and right up to those living through the crash of 1929:
(Excerpt) Read more at marketwatch.com ...
Actually 1933 was a very good year for gold.
Wow! What an enviable record. [The drones are clueless, so anything will be believed.]
Yeah. Note the high point in 1985-86, when Volcker destroyed the hopes of a generation for home ownership.
At 16% mortgage rates, the SOB made sure that no new buyers could get into the market.
Been there, remember that.
All in the name of killing inflation. Of course, in the process, he destroyed the economy, which only kept going because Reagan borrowed heavily for defense spending.
Yessirree, these guys is Big Geniuses.
Bookmark for later.
Volcker got us out of that recession quickly and there was 25 years of prosperity beginning with Reagan. The medicine was painful but it cured the economy. Now we have an economic depression to go wbith our low low mortgage rates, if you can find a paying job and save up the down payment.
That's what I always thought. He was Carter's appointee after Miller.
Wow! Didn’t know there were interest rate records going back 5000 years.
That's hilarious.
The cure was worse then the disease.
Reagan used defense spending to get the economy going after the Carter "malaise", which was really the aftereffects of the Iranian oil crisis and the oil price increases.
The economy in the U.S. didn't start moving until 1994 when the Gingrich Congress lowered taxes. Greenspan finally responded by lowering the interest rates that had been held artificially high for too long in the secular "fight" against inflation.
Volcker overdid it badly and it was borrowing for defense and tax cuts that kept the 80's limping along. Unfortunately that left us with debt which anyone can see increased steadily during that period.
Neither of them understood the non-linear response of a fiat currency based monetary system and thus they both caused problems they didn't understand.
except those aren’t really consumer interest rates since when? Bush the elder to Bush the younger and on through Obama the liar?
All the central banks have been able to do is slow the fall of this Great Debt Deflation.
they slowed it so much that it has not completed it's killing of already dead wood.
It will bring down innumerable Sovereigns before it's done as very, very few can either pay or refinance their debt...which, coincidentally are held by the largest banks, by law.
The pyramid is collapsing in slow motion.
You’re timing is off. Interest rates starting peaking for Jimmy Carter and because of the laffer type, it extended into RR term for the first year or so. I knew people with 19% apr home loans. By 1985 My fixed rate home loan was 7 1/4 %.
But... but... shari’a doesn’t allow interest.
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