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Quotes about Interest Rates from the world's top natural health / natural living authors

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"Immediately after this question, I asked on the questionnaire, "Which of the following better describes your theory about the declines: a theory about investor psychology [or] a theory about fundamentals such as profits or interest rates?" Most?7.5% of the institutional investors and 64.0% of the individual investors—picked a theory about investor psychology." - Brian Fagan, Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations (Get the book.) "Great Depression of the 1930s, when real interest rates were very low, while the stock market went through some periods when it was extremely low. The dividend present value calculated using consumption was also more volatile in the first half of the sample period shown, and it too has settled down considerably now. This present value actually captures the stock market crash of 1929, and shows some co-movements with the actual price in the earlier years." - Brian Fagan, Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations (Get the book.) "There appears to be less evidence of excess volatility in long-term interest rates and little evidence of excess volatility in the spread between stock price indexes.33 Individual stocks, for which the present value of future dividends is much more volatile than with the aggregate market, show less excess volatility than the market as a whole.34 Excess volatility due to speculative bubbles is probably just one of the factors that drive speculative markets, and the prominence of this factor varies across markets and over time. We are not always in an excess volatility situation." - Brian Fagan, Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations (Get the book.)

"It was based on selling long-term contractual memberships with high interest rates and few options for getting out of the contract. Memberships are advertised with extremely low enrollment and monthly dues. A typical promotion for Bally Total Fitness is something like "$5 Gets you Started." The catch is that the affordable enrollment and monthly dues are based on a long-term contract (typically 36 months) that generates big profits from huge interest rates." - Craig Pepin-Donat, The Big Fat Health and Fitness Lie (Get the book.)

"But for the poor people of the world, especially in developing nations, available services are usually limited to pawnbrokers or moneylenders who charge interest rates of up to 1000 percent per year—and even those loans are mainly available to people who already have some assets. On the whole, state-sponsored rural banks in developing countries have also proved to be a disaster. Microfinance is an invaluable strategy for generating income for people with limited financial resources. It involves minimal risk on the part of the lender with potentially lifechanging results for the borrower." - Alex Steffen, Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century (Get the book.)

"The Japanese set off their own deluge in the late 1980s, and then again in the mid-1990s, dropping interest rates to zero. The combination of Nipponese desperation with American ingenuity is what we have to thank for today's bubbles. After the Japanese stock market imploded in 1990, the U.S. tech stocks took off—up 900 percent between 1995 and 2000. Then the Kuwait stock market ballooned, up 471 percent in the next five years. Bombay stocks took off in 2003 and rose 340 percent. Meanwhile, U.S. housing prices doubled between 1995 and 2005. In England, the increase was even greater." - William Bonner, Lila Rajiva, Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets: Surviving the Public Spectacle in Finance and Politics (Agora Series) (Get the book.)

"News of interest rates in Frankfurt, he suggested, could shake up economic planning instantaneously in New York, Tokyo, and around the world.28 Americans would soon learn that environmental principles could be subject to similar, though far slower, shake-ups emanating from Brussels. REACH, though, would take more than three years before coming to a final vote. First the Europeans' attempt to reform a global industry would jump-start lobbying on a global scale never seen before. While REACH was being hotly debated in Europe, U.S. industry had little to worry about in Washington." - Mark Schapiro, Exposed: The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products and What's at Stake for American Power (Get the book.)

"In addition to high freight rates, low commodity prices, a fixed currency and shortage of money, farmers also suffered from heavy mortgage debts, high interest rates, local grain monopolies, corrupt local governments, and cloudy titles for land and water rights. Again, as in the earlier rebellions, a central issue with these populists was money (specie) for use versus money (capital) for profit, power, and control. Since before the Revolution, small farmers had been commodity rich and capital poor." - Will Allen, The War on Bugs (Get the book.)

"Industrial America is aging and has not been investing capital in this infrastructure, and if energy prices stay high and interest rates stay low, these types of projects will finally make the private sector budget cuts. Another motivation is one of social responsibility. "Everyone you meet now wants to say they are doing something important about being carbon-neutral and energy conservation," Davis said. "They are greening their facilities. But at the end of the day, most companies in their very competitive world of financial performance must look at things through strict economic terms." - David Steinman, Safe Trip to Eden: Ten Steps to Save Planet Earth from the Global Warming Meltdown (Get the book.) "The combination of international debts at high interest rates, rising unemployment, and national economic depression brought on by stifling international profiteering as one of America's preeminent banana republics led the Costa Rican government to embark on a campaign of rapid deforestation, for cheap timber and to raise cattle, as a means of raising foreign currency. It was a road to oblivion. Costa Rica's climate was not conducive to raising catde, and the country was destroying its real assets for short-term gains to pay off the stifling international debt." - David Steinman, Safe Trip to Eden: Ten Steps to Save Planet Earth from the Global Warming Meltdown (Get the book.)

"If they want higher interest rates, they go up. If they want lower rates, they go down. In essence, they dictate their profit margins to the government—at our expense. We the people are not in charge of our money or our own economy. It may seem that all this is quite esoteric and there is little we can do to alter this reality. But we can understand the nature of the beast and protect ourselves against its more nefarious actions. What Are They Up To? Our current global monetary system is centralizing political and economic power with the ability to destroy everything we've worked to achieve." - David H. Rippe, Jared Rosen, The Flip: Turn Your World Around (Get the book.)

"Between 1970 and 2002, debt-cancellation advocates point out, the lowest-income countries in Africa paid $298 billion on their original debts of $294 billion, and still owed over $200 billion as a result of extremely high interest rates, according to the Web site MakePovertyHistory.ca. These funds could otherwise suppport education and poverty alleviation." - Alex Steffen, Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century (Get the book.)

"When he assumed the Fed's highest post, he began tightening interest rates, a process that was only interrupted, briefly, by his reaction to the 1987 crash. The fed funds rate went from 6.5 percent when he took office on August 11, 1987, to a high of 10.7 percent in 1989.3 Higher borrowing costs probably produced the recession of 1990. The elder Bush believed Alan Greenspan had cost him the election. And Hillary Clinton seemed to think so, too. After the vote went to her husband, she chose to take a position next to Greenspan at the inauguration." - William Bonner, Lila Rajiva, Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets: Surviving the Public Spectacle in Finance and Politics (Agora Series) (Get the book.)

"Some optimists mistakenly viewed continued refinancing activity as a positive for the economy, believing that it would bolster consumer demand, as it had done since 2001. When interest rates trended lower, many homeowners swapped expensive fixed mortgages for lower-rate loans featuring smaller payments, helping to free up extra spending power every month. Millions also borrowed more than they needed to cover balances outstanding on existing mortgages." - Michael J. Panzner, Financial Armageddon: Protecting Your Future from Four Impending Catastrophes (Get the book.) "Anyone could have anticipated that our attitudes about debt, the widespread availability of borrowed money, and low U.S. interest rates would encourage Americans to borrow first and ask questions later. It was so easy, in fact, that the ratio of total debt to gross domestic product, a measure of U.S. economic output, rose to more than 300 percent by 2005, exceeding the record of 290 percent last seen just prior to the 1929 stock market crash." - Michael J. Panzner, Financial Armageddon: Protecting Your Future from Four Impending Catastrophes (Get the book.) "In addition, half of the mortgages underwritten in 2005 and 2006 were ARMs, while nearly 10 million mortgages—a quarter of the total outstanding—carried adjustable interest rates. And during 2006 and 2007, up to $2.5 trillion of those loans would be "reset," meaning payments would spike from their initial low levels after more than two years of interest rate hikes by the Federal Reserve. It was going to be ugly, that's for sure. Not all of the borrowing was for the purchase of new homes. According to the National Association of Realtors, a record 39." - Michael J. Panzner, Financial Armageddon: Protecting Your Future from Four Impending Catastrophes (Get the book.)

"The catch is that the affordable enrollment and monthly dues are based on a long-term contract (typically 36 months) that generates big profits from huge interest rates. The sales staff is notorious for not fully explaining the terms of the agreement, bending the truth or flat out lying to the consumer to get them to join. In 2004, a settlement was reached with the New York State Attorney General's office in which Bally Total Fitness received a large fine and was forced to change both their advertising and sales practices." - Craig Pepin-Donat, The Big Fat Health and Fitness Lie (Get the book.)

"Houses are financial assets to be actively managed, just as though they were stocks or a sailboat. When interest rates dip, new credit is unfurled; the house is refinanced at a lower rate with the borrower often taking out a little cash to spend. If rates seem to be going down, more sailcloth is hoisted at an adjustable rate to catch the favorable wind. What if rates rise? What if the weather turns bad?" - William Bonner, Addison Wiggin, Empire of Debt: The Rise of an Epic Financial Crisis (Get the book.)

"Given the option between a compelling story about the fall of interest rates on the one hand and the rise of Jenna Jamieson on the other, the pulchritudinous Ms. Jamieson wins hands down. Sex sells—even when it is perverse and ugly... even if it is a 50-year-old senator with an eye for buff young pages. A sex story will still bump war with Iraq off the front pages, seven days a week. Next to sex, even death is not always a very interesting business to the average pillar of the fourth estate. Take one leading cause of fatalities in the United States." - William Bonner, Lila Rajiva, Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets: Surviving the Public Spectacle in Finance and Politics (Agora Series) (Get the book.)

"Because of the high interest rates, she made only one penny in profit and therefore lived below subsistence level. Yunus realized that there must be a better way and took matters into his own hands. He lent the equivalent of seventeen pounds to forty-two basket-weavers. He found this tiny amount not only made it possible for them to survive but created the spark of personal initiative and enterprise necessary for them to pull themselves out of poverty." - David H. Rippe, Jared Rosen, The Flip: Turn Your World Around (Get the book.)

"In more normal times or in markets for individual stocks, such rational factors would assume relatively greater prominence in any discussion of changes in prices. Indeed it is thanks to a market's ability to respond appropriately to such factors, for a variety of investments, that well-functioning financial markets generally promote, rather than hinder, economic efficiency.1 The list of factors here was constructed specifically to help us understand the extraordinary recent situation in the stock markets and the housing markets, and so it concentrates on less rational influences." - Brian Fagan, Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations (Get the book.)

"As lenders aggressively courted business with an almost singular focus on generating fees and turnover, many invariably acted foolishly. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, for example, estimated that lenders had been ripped off to the tune of $1 billion in mortgage-related fraud in 2005 alone. Still, there were plenty of willing participants in the ever-expanding credit bubble, many of whom already found themselves under the gun even before things began to unravel." - Michael J. Panzner, Financial Armageddon: Protecting Your Future from Four Impending Catastrophes (Get the book.)

"Imagine an investor who bought a 30-year U.S. Treasury bond in 1970. Did he not have a right to expect to receive a dollar back for every dollar lent? And shouldn't he have been able to expect that each of those dollars he received—in the year 2000—would be worth about as much as those he had given up? We can measure the damage by looking at the price of gold. In 1970, each dollar would buy an investor %4 of an ounce of gold. Thirty-five years later, Mr. Market, sitting as judge and jury, tells us that a dollar is worth less than X25 of an ounce of gold. Investors, taking the U.S." - William Bonner, Addison Wiggin, Empire of Debt: The Rise of an Epic Financial Crisis (Get the book.)

"The supernaturally low interest rates provoked an orgy of buying, and the org}' of buying bid up the prices of the houses, and as the prices of the houses levitated, the owners entered another new and strange zone of hallucinated wealth accumulation using the latest contrivance: the refinanced mortgage. Re-fi's allowed house owners to use their houses as though they were automatic teller machines." - James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century (Get the book.) "Federal deposit insurance, which had been instituted in the depths of the Great Depression, and only for deposits under $2,500, was raised to $10,000 in 1950, and the middle class was induced to feel confident about keeping its money in banks again. interest rates remained modest, but so did inflation. The influx of savings made money available in capital markets to invest in new ventures. It was real money derived from work already done, pay already earned, true capital." - James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century (Get the book.) "Other players benefited from trading in world currencies, securities, commodities, and interest rates at minute differentials that existed because, since the 1970s, all monies and fungible financial instruments pegged to money floated on a collective hallucination of relative value, rather than being pegged to a fixed medium of value, such as gold. This aggravated the tendency, in a financial climate of extreme relativism, to create increasingly abstract vehicles of investment that were pegged to little more than wishes." - James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century (Get the book.)

"So the IMF said, "My god, you gotta get that money back—start raising interest rates!" So Ecuador raised their rates 10 ... 20 ... 30 ... 40 ... 50 ... 60 ... 70 ... 80 ... 90 percent. But that caused the economy to go into the tank. Then the World Bank said, "Well you can't raise interest rates anymore, so start selling everything that isn't nailed down." And when that money was used up to pay creditors, the Bank ordered a price hike in items like cooking gas. archbishop and a union leader named Oscar Olivera." - The Disinformation Company, Everything You Know Is Wrong: The Disinformation Guide to Secrets and Lies (Get the book.)

"What is worse, the longer the present system continues, the worse off Americans are. The closer you look at it, the larger the absurdity becomes. In the first half of 2005, Americans got poorer, not richer—at the rate of $80 million per hour. Their system of imperial finance was impoverishing them. Even that is not the worst of it, because it also reduced their ability to compete in the modern economic world. While they were providing a public good—at a loss—their competitors were saving money, building capital and expertise, setting up factories, and taking market share away from them." - William Bonner, Addison Wiggin, Empire of Debt: The Rise of an Epic Financial Crisis (Get the book.)

"Reasons are not scarce, and rational analysis is as plentiful as debris after a flood. Before long you're spitting out bumper-sticker thoughts. Slogans replace reason. And the private world of right and wrong has been replaced by the public spectacle, which knows no moral authority beyond its own desires. ALL MEN ARE DIFFERENT (AND DAMN WELL BETTER STAY THAT WAY) "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal ..." Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1776. What made Jefferson think it was self-evident, we don't know." - William Bonner, Lila Rajiva, Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets: Surviving the Public Spectacle in Finance and Politics (Agora Series) (Get the book.)

"CPI level, and an additional $700 billion jolt of federal spending. Corporate profits should be at epic highs, and there is no reason to anticipate more. The other possible source of gains for investors is other investors' money. If some other investor's pile were to go down, yours might go up. Wall Street promises as much; practically every advertisement for a mutual fund claims that it does better than its peers. Even if they all went down in actual, real value, they nevertheless crow that their "relative performance" beat out just about everyone else." - William Bonner, Addison Wiggin, Empire of Debt: The Rise of an Epic Financial Crisis (Get the book.)

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