Is the world of cheap money over?
08/24/2026 Weekly analysis
For many years, we lived in a world where money seemed to be plentiful. Governments could borrow at extraordinarily low interest rates, companies could easily finance almost any project, and millions of families were able to take out mortgages at rates that would be hard to imagine today. In Europe, we even experienced negative interest rates: lending money to some governments meant accepting that we would get back less than we had lent. We became so accustomed to that situation that we eventually came to see it as normal. However, that era has come to an end, and it is becoming increasingly clear that those years were the real exception.