Disability Insurance Observer: Sellin' Yellen

In the past, I’ve blogged about the argument that it seems as if Janet Yellen, the new Federal Reserve Board chair, seems to be part of an organization that’s applying the gas pedal and pushing on the brakes at the same time, without being especially conscious of that activity.

If you push the interest rates that big banks and big, publicly traded companies pay close to zero, but you make it next to impossible for someone like me — a gainfully employed, solvent, bill-paying person who has eaten meals with insurance rating analysts, without even stealing any silverware — to buy a house, the effective interest rate for a huge percentage of consumers is infinite.

We can use whatever credit facilities left over from when times were good, and those credit cards or home equity lines of credit may carry decent rates, but, for new credit, we have to locate loan sharks.

This has a direct effect on disability insurers and other players in the insurance industry, because they’re getting punished by this problems on both ends.

They suffer low returns on their investments, because the rates on the credit deals that do exist are so low, and they have a hard time selling products to people like me, partly because people like me have a hard time buying homes, starting businesses or doing anything else that requires credit. And, also, they lose the opportunity to earn somewhat higher rates of return by buying securities backed by mortgages issued to ordinary bill-paying people who somehow fail to make Equifax tingle.