Taux d'intérêt réels et activité économique

Whereas the seventies' had been characterized by major changes in the relative prices of goods and services, the rise in real interest rates, from 1980 on, has initiated an era of turmoil in the financial markets. The various relative price shocks — the oil price hikes, the rising real interest rates, the dollar appreciating vis-à-vis European currencies — have generally had negative consequences on production costs and demand. Their analysis requires combining supply and demand considerations, together with the interactions between financial markets and activity. The worldwide increase of real interest rates may be attributed first to restrictive monetary policy in the United States, then to increased profitability of investment in this country. The swelling federal budget deficit cannot, on its own, explain such a worldwide increase in real rates, in so far as fiscal policies in the rest of the world have been much tighter ; but it has contributed to the persistance a significant differential between US rates and those in the rest of the world. Worldwide high real interest rates have made the latest recession atypical. Indeed their effects both on the stock of productive capital and on firms' management of personnel have induced substantial increases in productivity at an early stage of the cycle. In most countries, productivity increases, together with the usual moderating effects on wages of slack in the labor markets, have been sufficient to rapidly cancel the rise in the share of wages in value added that had taken place in the seventies'. Such a restoration of firms' profit conditions may explain the persistance of higher real interest rates than what would be warranted by recent monetary and fiscal policies.