IT’S ONE of the fundamental lessons of any introductory economics course: lower interest rates, when all else remains equal, leads to higher levels of investment. But today, after several years of near-zero interest rates and only modest increases in investment to show for it, some economists are claiming just the opposite.
On October 26th, an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by Michael Spence and Kevin Warsh, both of Stanford University, argued that the Federal Reserve’s $3 trillion bond-buying programme, which was designed to push down long-term rates and boost corporate borrowing, has actually caused business investment to fall. The authors write that the Fed’s unconventional policies to expand the money supply, known as quantitative easing (QE), have made short-term financial assets like stocks and bonds more appealing as their capital value increases, thereby diverting capital from more productive longer-term investments in the “real economy”. The result has been low investment growth, weak productivity, and stagnant...Continue reading
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