All the fund manager presentations are focusing, not on interest rates, but they’re controlling parent, bond yields. This is what the markets (ie the guys who are the main recipients of bankers’ bonuses) think interest rates are likely to be sooner and often very much later. So if you have a ‘bond’, a loan to a company or government, which says it will pay 4% a year for 5 years, and you think rates will be, say, 5%, that 4% bond will be worth less than it’s face value. And vice verse. Currently, they think they’re going to be higher for longer; which means bond yields are up; which isn’t desperately good news. That’s very short term not good news however, and any small indication that inflation is coming down can (and will) change everything very quickly. Which is why the long-term is all.
“CBI forecasts no Bank of England rate cuts until at least 2026”
The ‘lag’, ‘trailing leg’ or ‘long wake’ of any economic measure means that its effects are often felt long after the problem it was supposed to solve has disappeared. 2010’s ‘balancing the books within the space of one parliament’ (that went well, didn’t it?), austerity to you and me, is one example.