Interesting conversation. I was born during the depression and raised by parents who came from poor families. In that era loans were not made with the ease and in the amounts that are so common today. My parents were shocked when I borrowed a few hundred dollars to buy a car fifty years ago. They saved for 15 years in order to buy a house for cash. There were obviously no credit cards so you paid cash or wrote a check drawn on funds you had in the bank. No overdrafts! Qualifying for a loan was not easy and bankers were not advertising to try to encourage you to go into debt.Today's young people buy large houses, using large mortgages, before they are married.Then they both need jobs to finance their living standards. No wonder they are highly stressed!
I view interest as rent paid to the lender for the use of the lender's money and in return for the lender foregoing the use of those funds for himself. It seems to me that, when governments manipulate interest rates down to zero, or even lower, they are admitting that their currency has very little true value. Very theoretical, but the way the moneyed class is buying up hard assets at increasingly high prices seems to prove my point.
