IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/24258.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Are Interest Rates Really Low?

Author

Listed:
  • Daniel R. Feenberg
  • Clinton Tepper
  • Ivo Welch

Abstract

Contrary to common perception, many fixed-income investors have not suffered unusually low real interest rates in and after the Great Recession of 2008. This is because taxable investors must first pay taxes on nominal interest returns, before inflation further reduces their earned real interest rates. To obtain the same real after-tax yield, investors need more than one-to-one compensation for inflation. As a result, long-term Treasury bonds have been no less attractive for taxable investors in 2016 (with a 1.0% post-tax real yield) than they were in 2006 (0.5%), 1976 (–1.7%), 1966 (0.9%), and 1956 (0.8%), although they have been less attractive than they were in 1996 (2.4%) and 1986 (2.9%). Short-term Treasury bond yields have been on the low side but have also not been particularly unusual.

Suggested Citation

  • Daniel R. Feenberg & Clinton Tepper & Ivo Welch, 2018. "Are Interest Rates Really Low?," NBER Working Papers 24258, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:24258
    Note: AP IFM
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w24258.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Olivier Blanchard, 2019. "Public Debt and Low Interest Rates," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 109(4), pages 1197-1229, April.
    2. Knolle, Julia, 2020. "Prosperity in a Low Interest Environment," MPRA Paper 104332, University Library of Munich, Germany.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • E0 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - General
    • E21 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Consumption; Saving; Wealth
    • G0 - Financial Economics - - General
    • G12 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Asset Pricing; Trading Volume; Bond Interest Rates
    • H0 - Public Economics - - General
    • H2 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue
    • H24 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - Personal Income and Other Nonbusiness Taxes and Subsidies

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:24258. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.