Not trolling, that would mean I am being insincere about something to provoke a reaction.
I understand you don’t see yourself as making predictions. But what I see in your article are implicit assumptions that amount to predictions about the future.
The two big ones are
(1) rates have probably hit their lows and the realistic future scenarios are higher rates or flat rates
(2) a move in inflation above 4% for a few years will lead to higher nominal rates. I.e., you seem to discount (no pun intended) the possibility of extended and highly negative real rates.
who’s to say that those underlying causes won’t start to shift in the other direction at some point
The big underlying cause of declining rates is demographic. And the big demographic shift certainly is not going to go in the other direction. Hungary and Russia are the latest nations that have spent a ton of money subsidizing births. And they did get some return, in the sense of getting birthrates to go from 1.4 to 1.7 children per woman for Hungary and Russia from 1.2 to 1.5 (if I remember the exact numbers right).
But there’s zero examples of nations headed toward aging and declining working age populations actually reversing trend. And while there are few exceptions, aging and declining fertility are trends that are accelerating, and spreading from the developing world increasingly to poorer and middle income nations.
And even if we could somehow go back to 2.2+ TFR, demographic momentum means this would have to last for 15+ years to have a serious dent in long term economic trends.
So I plead guilty to dismissing the possibility of this trend “shift[ing] in the other direction.”
The trend of growing inequality I also don’t see changing, even though it could happen much more easily.
The developed world has a mix of parties that support inequality policies openly like the GOP and those that pretend to care, or are ineffectual and corrupted, like the Democrats. Bernie can’t even win a Democratic primary. And in a hypothetical where he or someone similar becomes President, he needs 60 votes in the Senate to pass major legislation which is never going to happen because rural midwestern and western areas that used to vote for Democrats have stopped.
In the EU meanwhile, the ECB smashes down any party that seeks to address inequality.
All of this political analysis applies equally to inflation, which is an egalitarian policy that elites around the world have demonized and crushed. The MSM is just packed the past year with awful scare stories about inflation, but never covers deflation. Here’s Irvine progressive journalist Kevin Drum debunking a related MSM scare story:
