How Much Are Central Banks 'Hurting' Savers Around the World?

The financial world, in its own nervous way, continues to anxiously speculate on when rate hikes will materialize in the U.S.

Current “consensus” among Federal Reserve observers places the month of the first rate increase somewhere around June 2015. (Of course, that date is highly variable, even among voting members of the FOMC.)

Central banks raising interest rates would end the loosening cycle

Should the Federal Reserve actually raise interest rates sometime next year, it would be the end of the “loosening” cycle. An increase in the short-term interest rate (the rate the Fed directly controls) in June would mean that the loosening cycle that began on September 18, 2007 will have been the longest on record, at almost eight years.

Eight years...