In Moneyweek Matthew Lynn makes the point that, if interest rates don't go up soon, they might never go up at all.
It's been six years since the Bank of England took interest rates down to near zero as an "emergency measure", and during that time, people have got used to the low rates. They have become the new normal. When rates go up, an awful lot of people will feel the pain, but, more importantly, almost no-one will feel the gain. This is because savers, too, have got used to the low rates and have spent years putting their money into something that pays a better rate of return than an interest-bearing bank account. So with so many losers and so few winners, why should a government ever want to put interest rates up again?
It's also starting to look like the "new normal" is pretty like the "old normal", with the high interest rates of the end of the twentieth century being just a blip, but, more ominously, it looks like the high home-ownership rates and low house prices of that same period may be a blip too and the "unaffordable" house prices of today are here to stay. Not so much back to the future as forward to the past.