In order to understand how things work it is often useful to consider an extreme example. So to better understand the consequences of raising the rates by 0.5%, 1% or 2%, and also just for fun, let's consider what would happen if the rates would rise to 100%.
So there it happend, JPow got completely mad and you get up in the morning and see the FED rates stand at 100%. What happens next?
Would people cut spending and put all their savings into the 100% yielding government bonds? Do everybody just sell all the stocks and load up on bonds? Do commercial banks stop any credit action and also load up on bonds? So can all the businesses finance themselves anyhow?
Businesses would probably just switch to overseas banks and borrow in Euro for example. Borrowing in euro eventually generates a lot of demand for it as just like with every credit you need to pay back more than you got. So this looks like a reason for the dollar to loose against the euro.
Its also clear that everybody would ask where the government is going to find the money to pay so huge interest and everybody would obviously know that the only option is printing a lot of new money. So that really looks like something very pro-inflatory and also bad for the dollar.
Normally rising rates damages the economy but wouldn't so huge hike lead to just switching to an alternative currency and at the end the impact to the real economy would not be so huge? So then maybe so huge hike would not really lead to everybody selling all the stocks and loading up US bonds because people would just completely loose trust in the dollar, and the bonds denominated in it, and keep holding stocks which have fundamental value: businesses produce real products and provide services really needed by everybody.
Of course what would really happen is the FED leadership would be just changed and the insane changes reverted. But if not I think the result would be a total collapse of the dollar, which is counterintuitive because normally the currency strengthens when the rates are raised.
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