As a follow-up to our previous post in this series, "Nothing Natural About Low Rates," we see good reason to believe that the explanation for the current low real-rate environment lies in the incentives that govern the prevailing monetary regime.
Starting in the era of the "Greenspan put," central banks in developed countries have been increasingly keen to cut rates in the face of economic and market downturns and ever less ready to raise rates as circumstances normalize.
In the case of the United States, real rates were greater than 5% prior to the Black