Interest Rate

Interest is the difference in the valuation of present goods and future goods; it is the discount in the valuation of future goods as against that of present goods.

Planning for Freedom, pp. 187–88

The height of the market rate of interest ultimately does not depend on the whims, fancies, and the pecuniary interests of the personnel operating the government apparatus of coercion and compulsion, the much-referred-to “public sector” of the economy.

Planning for Freedom, p. 188

It cannot be denied that everyone is inclined—especially among the borrowers of this lowest category—to overestimate his own credit rating, and call the rates demanded by creditors too high.

A Critique of Interventionism, p. 49

Public opinion always wants “easy money,” that is, low interest rates.

A Critique of Interventionism, p. 163

There cannot be any question of abolishing interest by any institutions, laws, or devices of bank manipulation. He who wants to “abolish” interest will have to induce people to value an apple available in a hundred years no less than a present apple. What can be abolished by laws and decrees is merely the right of the capitalist to receive interest. But such decrees would bring about capital consumption and would very soon throw mankind back into the original state of natural poverty.

Human Action, p. 529; p. 532

The expectation of rising prices thus has the tendency to make the gross rate of interest rise, while the expectation of dropping prices makes it drop.

Human Action, p. 540; p. 543

The greater the fund of means of subsistence in a community, the lower the rate of interest.

The Theory of Money and Credit, p. 386