The cause of increasing rates is a booming economy and growing incomes.

I think rates will go back down. They are so much lower in Europe and Japan. The reason was this is that they expected the dollar to weaken and eliminate the benefit of the extra interest. In fact in has been the opposite.

Large Euro and Japanese investors holding onto their local bonds at negative or 0/1% interest rates year after year is as dumb as when they were loaning us money for Option ARMS that S&P promised were “AAA.”

Their own local stock markets are also much better investments than their bonds. But the best investments in the developed world remain in the USA and Canada.