Gotti joins the big grey interest rate whine

From Gotti today:

Charlie Nelson’s foreseechange has been researching consumers in Australia since 2005 and is often able to pick up significant trends well ahead of official statistics. Since 2005, Nelson has been asking consumers, from the point of view of their own financial position, whether they would prefer interest rates to rise, fall or not change. Since 2010, the number of people surveyed has been 1,200.

In recent times, his research is showing that increasingly people want higher rather than lower interest rates. One of the graphs he publishes is interest rate sensitivity according to age groups.

While you might expect that older adults would have a clear preferences for higher rates, preference for higher rates actually starts rising when people are 45 and once respondents are aged 55, more than 40 per cent of them want higher rates and, of course, it keeps rising.

This is an enormous slice of the consumer market in an ageing economy because consumer groups aged over 50 have strong spending power.

And? There’s more debt in this economy than savings by a long way so if you want to free up money for “stimulus” then lower rates will work better. But that is by-the-by.

The fact is pointing to one interest group and saying that they can save the economy while ignoring everything else is a pile of rent-seeking clap trap. Gotti has himself argued we need a lower dollar yet here he is arguing for a higher one, that will hit the economy a lot harder than a few old farts buying an extra tube of Anusol.