Is it time for Fed to raise interest rates?
TEXT OF STORY
Kai Ryssdal: The yield on one-year Treasury bills was less than a half percent today. Even 10-year notes get you less than 4 percent. That helps explain why investors big and small have started chasing bigger returns with riskier bets. And it brings us to the rock-and-a-hard-place decision that faces the Federal Reserve next week as they meet to decide whether to bump up interest rates above zero.
Our senior business correspondent Bob Moon explains.
Bob Moon: Analysts expect most monetary policy makers to support holding the line on interest rates. But there’s growing pressure for the Fed to begin returning rates to more normal levels.
Thomas Hoenig heads the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank. And leading up to next week’s meeting, he’s been warning that too much easy money is what got us in this mess.
Thomas Hoenig: People argue about this, but I’m of the view that having a extended period of low interest rates in the early part of the decade of the 2000s, not by itself, but it was a contributing factor to the crisis that we’re now working our way through. So we need to be mindful of that.
Hoenig spoke recently on the Fox Business Channel.
At Clearview Economics, Ken Mayland shares Hoenig’s concerns. He worries the economic recovery is being built on artificial gains, created by what he calls a flood of “funny money.”
Ken Mayland: It wants to find a home, in the form of higher prices for goods and services, and in the form of higher asset prices — stock prices or homes or value of bonds.
The easy money also troubles investment adviser Axel Merk. But he understands why the Fed sees a need to keep its interest rate crutch in place.
Axel Merk: The banking system in the U.S. needs to become even healthier, and the best way to do that is for the Federal Reserve to provide very cheap money to the banking system.
Merk says he expects the central bank to promise vigilance, but make no real change. And that worries the Kansas City Fed’s Thomas Hoenig, who argues the central bank can’t keep putting off a decision.
Hoenig: Doing nothing is a decision, and it has its own set of consequences.
I’m Bob Moon for Marketplace.
Stories You Might Like
There’s a lot happening in the world. Through it all, Marketplace is here for you.
You rely on Marketplace to break down the world’s events and tell you how it affects you in a fact-based, approachable way. We rely on your financial support to keep making that possible.
Your donation today powers the independent journalism that you rely on. For just $5/month, you can help sustain Marketplace so we can keep reporting on the things that matter to you.
