The last time the Bank Rate was 5% was on 7th October 2008 (when the Labour Party had been in government for eleven years).
In the intervening period of 177 months, the rate has been at 1% or lower for 163 of them. It spent 21 months (from 19th March 2020 to 16th December 2021) at the ludicrously low rate of 0.1%. In fact it never got above 1% from 4th February 2009 to 16th June 2022.
During that period of 13 years, savers were effectively lending money to people for nothing, enabling them to buy houses (so stoking house price inflation), take holidays, and buy expensive cars. Now these same people, who over reached themselves to ridiculous levels whilst thinking that virtually free borrowing would last forever, are moaning that their mortgage repayments are about to increase.
They should spare a thought for the hard-pressed savers, who outnumber borrowers by about six to one and who funded their lifestyles. During those 13 years, anybody with a modest nest-egg of £100,000 should have received about £4,500 in interest annually (assuming interest rates were at a sensible level of 4.5%). Instead they received less than £1,000 pa (and between March 2020 and December 2021 they received £100 pa). I didn’t hear too many of them wailing on about the effects that low interest rates were having on them (i.e. costing them about £3-4k a year). Taxpayers did not bail them out when they hit hard times – they just had to get on with it.
People need to get a grip. The fifteen year folly of cheap money has been exposed as just that – a monumental confidence trick which has been instrumental in the current situation arising. The bills for paying people to sit at home in their pyjamas during the pandemic and for the country’s negligence with its energy security policy have now landed on the doormat. The worthless money that was printed to fund the government’s munificence in handling those matters has now become well and truly absorbed into the economy and it has diluted the value of the cash that was already there. Schoolboy (and girl) economics teaches that if you print worthless money there can only be one result – inflation. The only surprise was that it took so long to manifest itself.
Mark Carney, the former governor of the B of E, likes to blame these problems onto Brexit. Our leaving the EU has nothing to do with it. It is the policies adopted by him, his predecessors and successors, that are to blame. They might as well have given every household a printing press and told them to print as many five-pound notes as they liked.