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Interest Rates: Naturally Negative?

blog.pimco.com

101–110 of 147 posts

Re: Interest Rates: Naturally Negative?

#101
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a source for your money velocity claim? Intuition implies it would be the opposite

How so? It checks with my intuition quite fine. Do you mean as a total volume of dollars earned?

Wealthy people are likely to invest any cash received immediately which would be invested or loaned out to businesses that purchase things and pay salaries.

They don't take their extra $100K and stick it under a mattress.

Re: Interest Rates: Naturally Negative?

#102
post #93
post #46

This Danish bank has a -0.5 percent interest rate. Source (in Danish language): https://www.jyskebank.dk/bolig/nyheder/realkredit-med-negati... It still looks like it'll actually be over 0 percent with fees and costs.

Excuse me what? If something is already negative interest rate, how would fees and costs (which are also negative) push that to 0?

If you look at fees and costs as negative then interest rates on mortgages have always been negative? You have to add them to calculate the effective interest rate paid on a loan.

Re: Interest Rates: Naturally Negative?

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

over half of the American population owns less than nothing Median net worth is $97k, and between 80 and 90 percent of households are above zero: https://dqydj.com/net-worth-brackets-wealth-brackets-one-per...

I'm basing that claim on this: https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2019/06/14/top-1-up-21-... https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/ >To derive this, I initially take the nominal net worth aggregates for each wealth group that are provided by the Federal Reserve and subtract out consumer durables. Consumer durables are things like cars and fridges that many academics who work on wealth distributions…

Doesn't seem reasonable to suggest that someone who just bought $10K in durable consumer good for cash has a negative net worth.

Re: Interest Rates: Naturally Negative?

#104
post #93
post #46

This Danish bank has a -0.5 percent interest rate. Source (in Danish language): https://www.jyskebank.dk/bolig/nyheder/realkredit-med-negati... It still looks like it'll actually be over 0 percent with fees and costs.

Excuse me what? If something is already negative interest rate, how would fees and costs (which are also negative) push that to 0?

Cash you get (loan amount) minus cash you give (payments + fees) will give you a net interest rate.

With negative mortgage interest rates you might borrow $200K and only pay back $190K, but if there are $10K in fees, then you're net interest rate is 0%.

Re: Interest Rates: Naturally Negative?

#106

When I see people defend negative interest rates, I am reminded of this saying by Orwell: "One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool." >>One likely factor behind the savings glut and negative interest rates is negative “time preference.” Once upon a time, economic theory maintained that people always value today’s consumption more than tomorrow’s consump…

Especially for rich people and for consumption (not investment) it looks obvious to me that they have negative time preference for consumption. Why? They could choose to consume all their money today to whatever they want (business jets, charity, space travel etc) and live rest of their lives in poverty if they face negative interest rates on their assets. That's what a positive time preference looks like. Of course, even when rates are negative, the rich people choose to live comfortably also in the future, even if their total consumption is slightly smaller. And as the wealth has been concentrating during the last decades more and more to the wealthy ones, the interest rate needs to reflect more and more the time preference of the wealthy ones. You want to get higher interest rates, you need to reverse the wealth concentration.

(All of the above is completely without source or further arguments or detailed analysis available, just my thoughts.)

Re: Interest Rates: Naturally Negative?

#107

Obviously this article shows up when the negative rates are already here, with the benefit of hindsight. What I am more interested in at this point is what is a good, safe alternative for a small time investor who’s already overweight on equities and housing. Bonds used to be the sensible pillar that worked at times when stock market crashed and now it doesn’t really make sense to use them for a small guy.

Take the portion you want to protect with least risk, divide it into $250K chunks (the FDIC limit) and put each in a savings account with a different bank. You'll make a small interest rate and you'll have FDIC insurance covering the entire amount. That's safer than any of the Treasury securities since you will still have the backing of the US government, you can use it to rebalance your portfolio at any time, and you don't have interest rate risk. This is one area where you have an advantage over the big players like Pimco, who can't protect themselves with FDIC insurance.

Re: Interest Rates: Naturally Negative?

#108
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so? It checks with my intuition quite fine. Do you mean as a total volume of dollars earned?

Wealthy people are likely to invest any cash received immediately which would be invested or loaned out to businesses that purchase things and pay salaries. They don't take their extra $100K and stick it under a mattress.

Investment is a problematic word because it has so many subtly different meanings.

Let's say you "invest" in the stock market. Does that actually cause any business to "invest" more? The answer is likely no. It'll drive up the stock prices of the company whose shares you buy, yes, but companies don't tend to make investment decisions based on their share price.

Conversely, companies do make investment decisions based on the demand for their products, so giving money to poor people who immediately spend it is likely to cause more (real world) investment than giving it to rich people who merely "invest" it.

Re: Interest Rates: Naturally Negative?

#109
post #96
post #95

I don't understand why people are just shrugging off the adjective 'naturally'. Interest rates in the present system aren't natural, they are set by the central banks. A system where a small number of central bankers choose a number might be a good system, but to call it natural is an abuse of language. If the 'natural' rate for lending money was 10%, we'd never be able to find it because the US, European and whichev…

which part of savings glut do you not understand?

I understand what a savings glut is.

The point is, we wouldn't know if we had one because that the interest rates are a number being chosen by a small committee. We might not have a savings glut, we might have a natural rate of interest at 10% that is being suppressed by central banks.

There is a minor pension crisis in the United States and their infrastructure is not in great shape. That doesn't make it look like there is a savings glut. There is a lot that needs to be done.

Re: Interest Rates: Naturally Negative?

#110

When I see people defend negative interest rates, I am reminded of this saying by Orwell: "One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool." >>One likely factor behind the savings glut and negative interest rates is negative “time preference.” Once upon a time, economic theory maintained that people always value today’s consumption more than tomorrow’s consump…

Your alternative theory doesn't make sense: being presented with options like negative interest rates ought to nudge people further towards current consumption (a positive time preference) rather than the opposite.
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