| 摘要 | This article appears in the October 10, 2016 issue of National Review.
Interest rates around the world have been pretty low lately. You might be surprised to discover how low.
According to the landmark history of interest rates compiled by Sidney Homer and Richard Sylla, human beings have been engaging in recorded credit transactions for more than 5,000 years. Homer and Sylla report that it was customary for Sumerians to charge an interest rate of 20 percent per year for loans of silver as far back as 3000 B.C. In Babylonian times, the priests of the god Shamash of Sippar loaned silver at 6.25 percent per year, but rates often climbed as high as 20 percent. In the 6th century B.C., the rate on Greek loans was 18 percent, while the rate on “safe” Greek investments dropped all the way to about 8 percent by the first century A.D.
Contracts involving large sums of money or resources have been extremely important for most of history. Indeed, “recorded” history is often a record of some debt arrangement. When the economic stakes were high, it made sense to hire a scribe, or to chip away at a tablet. While much of interest-rate history is anecdotal, by the Middle Ages it became common to keep detailed economic records, so it is possible to construct an interest-rate series on comparable assets back to that time.
The accompanying chart follows the discount rates and bond yields for the economic powerhouses of the time period as compiled by the financial firm Global Financial Data (GFD). As described by GFD chief economist Bryan Taylor, up until the 16th century, the economic powerhouse was Italy; then it was Spain; then, in the 17th century, the Netherlands briefly dominated the world economic stage, owing to its strong trade connections; then, because the country was small, its dominance quickly shifted to Great Britain. Following World War I, the United States became the center of global economic activity and has since remained so. While it is important to note the somewhat subjective nature of determining an economic powerhouse, these assumptions allow us to construct a continuous sampling of rates across hundreds of years.
The chart plots two rates. The discount rates are short-term central-bank rates spanning the years 1522 to 2009. The long-term government-bond yields go back all the way to 1285. The duration of each long-term bond varies, ranging from those with no maturity date—as with the oldest Italian bond, the Prestiti of Venice—to those with the now-standard ten-year maturity period of the U.S. government bond.
What sticks out, of course, is the end of the chart, where both the short-term and the long-term interest rates are lower than they have been at other times in recorded history. The chart, by focusing at the end on the U.S. rate, actually understates the case. Central banks around the world are experimenting with negative interest rates, and the Wall Street Journal reports that globally there is now approximately $10 trillion of government debt with negative yields. Fed chairwoman Janet Yellen revealed in a recent speech that the U.S. might try negative interest rates as well.
Which raises the $10 trillion question: Is the economy so much worse now than it has been over the past 5,000 years that negative interest rates make sense?
The most reasonable answer is probably “Yes.” For today, unlike any other time in human history, our financial markets have been taken over by Keynesian central bankers determined to drive interest rates into negative territory, purportedly because of the positive stimulus such low rates provide. This creates a terrible equilibrium. If rates are expected to be negative, it makes no sense for private investors to accumulate capital. The government is effectively charging you a fine of 1 percent of capital for the crime of having money in the bank in the future. When capital accumulation and the accompanying investment tanks in response to this policy, growth slows, making the wizards at the central bank even more sure that rates should be even more negative. In the age of Harambe, interest rates are lower than they have been since Hammurabi. |
