You don't look at Fed, Freddie Mac and Treasury etc. data much? There's a lot of average interest rates, with and without inflation adjustment. Actually a lot of that data is provided, just so you can calculate what you would approximately gain or lose from buying/selling (in itself not a bad idea). There are standards and conventions for statistics of rate averages. Since the rates can change from day to day, and for week to week, it may not take very long before you've got quite a complex calculation to work out even for shortterm stuff (I guess it is all done via programs these days).
One ECB paper provides a quite interesting long-run comparison of what they call the "real interest rate" for Germany, EU and US http://www.ecb.int/pub/pdf/scpwps/ecbwp546.pdf but, this is the point, I do not really know how they have computed it (same problem as before). They refer to the "natural real interest rate" rather than a "neutral real interest rate". The ECB suggestion is, that there really is a "natural real interest rate", but they say it is just very difficult to know what it is, because it is so difficult to measure. The general idea I am trying to get across is, that what often happens in economics is, that a concept is presented as if it is based on data, while actually data are being mustered to bolster a prior concept, after which it is suggested that the concept reflects a real object, even although it might admittedly be "difficult to measure" for technical reasons. But in reality no proof has been given at all, that the concept does have its objective correlate in the real world. In this way, whole series of economic categories can acquire the status of objective, mind-independent realities, even although they are really only theoretical conventions. The way Ernest Mandel put the problem in 1982 is as follows: "The. question is how to discipline the banks. How do you force them to cease credit expansion while at the same time avoiding a crisis of 1929-1932 proportions? That is the dilemma for the ruling class. Outright deflation entails a collapse of the banking system while all-out inflation stops the system functioning." http://www.ernestmandel.org/en/works/txt/1982/world_monetary_crisis.htm J. J.
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