Of course, you will read about everywhere how low interest rates hurt savers and pensioners. But this obvious and visible consequence is not the real bottleneck. Interest rates are the most important prices in a market economy. Interest rates coordinate production over time. The artificially low interest rates of today will lead to erroneous investment decisions, which will avenge themselves in only one possible way: a depression with a capital D.

The ECB-meeting last Thursday was all but exciting, perhaps even flat out boring. That is more or less the sentiment of most pundits about the ECB-meeting of last week. In my opinion, this prevailing sentiment does no justice to the meeting. And I argue that this is the case because of just two words, which were mentioned in the press release that was published after the, indeed, deadly boring meeting.

This week we will take a visual approach. I will share with you collection of ten graphs that might give pause for thought. We live in exceptional times: never did central banks exert so much influence on our lives. Many savers, investors and pensioners own a metaphorical pie in the sky. The present value of their riches is greatly overstated because of extreme central bank policies. And these charts will show you exactly what this means. Below you will find 10 startling statistics. Click on the charts for a larger version.... »