Interest rates could remain at their record lows “forever,” according to one asset manager, despite a recent rush to normalize policy by many of the world’s central banks. GAM Investments’ Julian Howard told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” last week that he believed it was “entirely consistent historically to talk about low rates forever.” Howard is the lead investment director of multi-asset solutions at GAM, which has 103 billion Swiss francs ($112 billion) in assets under management. He cited research by economic historian Paul Schmelzing, who was a visiting scholar at the Bank of England when the paper was published in 2020. The research looked at interest rates globally dating back to the 14th century, identifying a downward trend, with Schmelzing predicting that “real rates could soon enter permanently negative territory.” Howard said the lower rates that we had seen in recent years were, therefore, “actually a return to a very, very long-term trend of yields falling over an extended period of time.”
Source: Economy
