Ric Battellino, Deputy Governor of RBA gives a short overview on what central banks have been doing globally.
This is quite a statement:
The unusual period of monetary policy began in September 2008, after the failure of Lehman Brothers dramatically escalated the financial crisis. This in turn led to a collapse of household and business confidence around the world. Official interest rates have since been cut very sharply across virtually all countries due to the highly synchronised nature of the current economic cycle. The average reduction in interest rates has been 330 basis points in the developed economies and about 300 basis points in emerging economies. Among the developed economies, only four – Australia, New Zealand, Denmark and Norway – still have official interest rates above 1 per cent. Official interest rates have never been this low in the developed world in the 150-year period for which we have data (Graph 1)
We keep hearing theese are the lowest interest rates in UK, Euroarea (in ECB’s history) etc. Now here they calculate median interest rates of US, UK, Japan, Germany and find the rates to be lowest in 150 years!!!
