Faculty News

Professor Richard Sylla weighs in on negative borrowing rates

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Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "Mr. Sylla tells me there are 'precious few minus signs before any rates' in his book ['The History of Interest Rates']. The only ones he can recall were on U.S. Treasury bills around 1941, just before Pearl Harbor. But 'later research showed that anomaly might be explained by an option value embedded in bills then, so the negative yields may have been an artifact.' Mr. Sylla sums it up: 'There were no negative bond yields in 5,000 years of recorded history.'"

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