12th February:

www.nytimes.com/2014/02/13/business/inte...nt-trigger.html?_r=0
18th March:

www.marketplace.org/topics/economy/there...mber-federal-reserve
It's almost like they were always going to do that because both economies are completely fucked.

Maybe they just remembered that after years and years of tinkering with unemployment figures to mqke things look better, no-one actually knows what the real figures are any more?

It could even be by design?? (low rates... screwed economies) ... not sure they want middle class or even upper middle class sitting on numbers in the bank and generating income anymore like they have been doing in the past... (i think they want the money in the markets and to prop up property perhaps) ... and the rest of what happens, the people at the top dont seem to give a crap.

James Goldsmith for one was an important enough person who seemed to be concerned in the past about where western economies were heading due to policy (ive talked about this before and posted a 96 interview with him in the finance section) ... but clearly he was at odds with those around him when you know about all the policies and so on that were enacted and have created the current situation.

If you have billions then savings rates don't matter much, you can easily move money around into various investments and probably would've been doing that regardless of bothering with savings as they're inevitably of a much lower return anyway.

As for why interest rates are so low its self evident...govts are bloody broke and they can't afford to repay if the rates are upped, I said ages ago there's no way they can go up again now they would simply default.

andyh wrote:
I agree. It is those with much less and that dont have those connections (or stock market connections ) , the people with perhaps a few hundred k or a mill, perhaps more, and so on put away, that cant generate as much income or as high a wage anymore... they are the ones im talking about.

The higher ups are a whole other deal yep it wont affect them one iota.

I don't even know anyone with 10k in savings let alone a mil lol

andyh wrote:
Well theres enough people in Oz for one that do have some tucked away and who were earning good money from historically high interest rates... until recently.

Many of them must have voted liberal at the last federal election, many said they would when there seemed to be a movement in complaining about the low rates in the various media and what it was doing to investors and even retirees who relied on that income.

...yes Abbott (whos wife is an NM Rothschild banker) and Turnbull (ex head of Goldman Sachs) will help you guys, because they really do care.

novum wrote: This is a total obsession in Britain. If you took away house price inflation, financial sector manipulation, war profiteering, oil and retail consumerism (most of which involves massive multinational non-British companies) there is no economy.andyh wrote: There's no incentive to save, if you're going to spend less money than you make, you might as well invest it. They don't want you to save, they want you to spend and speculate. It was completely laughable yesterday that George Osborne claimed it was a budget for savers, and all the newspapers just repeated it like a mantra. If you took the £15,000 ISA limit that they offered yesterday, you can currently make about £250-300 per year interest. And that's going with ropey banks. HSBC's basic ISA rate is 0.5%:

www.hsbc.co.uk/1/2/savings-accounts/cash-isa/interest-rates

I remember when I had an ISA in the late 90s, at one time I made over £1,000 interest in a year. Which didn't seem unreasonable and of course £1,000 was worth significantly more back then, not to mention the fact that when I bought a little flat I put a deposit of about £4,000 down on it (imagine doing that today!). You can just see from these basic figures how skewed the economy has become against the average person, but it happens gradually in such a way that people don't realise how badly they're getting screwed, and of course they don't understand the mechanisms that underpin the economy. As long as there are consumer products, beer and football, I don't think most people ever will.