What does “interest rates”, without any further context, generically refer to?
"In the United States, if someone refers to the ""interest rate"", especially if heard on news or talk radio in particular, they are almost always referring to the federal funds rate, a rate set forth and maintained by the United States Federal Reserve (the ""fed"" for short). If the fed opts to raise or lower this rate, it subsequently effects all interest rates, whether by being directly connected in a chain of loans  or by market demand through the efficiency of financial markets in the case of bond auctions. The FOMC meets eight times each year to determine the target for the federal funds rate.  The federal funds rate effects all interest rates because it is the originating rate of interest on all loans in the chain of loans. Because of this significance as a benchmark for all interest rates, it is the rate most commonly referred to as ""interest rate"" when used alone. That is why other rates are specified by what they actually are; e.g., mortgage rates; 10 year & 30 year (for 10 year treasury and 30 year treasury bond yields respectively); savings rate, auto rate, credit card rate, CD rate—all rates of interest effected by the originating loan that is the federal funds rate.  This is true in the United States but will vary for other countries. In general though, it will almost always refer to the originating rate for all loans in a given country, institution, etc.  Note that bonds have yields that are based on market demand that is, in turn, based on the federal funds rate. It is because of the efficiency of financial markets that the demand, and thus the yields, are correlated to the federal funds rate." The generic representative of interest rates is the 10 year treasury bond rate. (USA). As an approximation most other interest rates do tend to move up and down with the treasury rate, but with more or less sensitivity.  Another prominently discussed interest rate is the short term loan rate established by the Federal Reserve for loans it makes to banks. Generically, interest rates being charged are driven in large part by the central bank's rate and competition tends to keep similar loans priced fairly close to each other. Interest rates being paid are driven by what's needed to get folks to lend you their money (deposit in bank, purchase bonds) so it's again related. There certainly isn't very direct coupling, but in general interest rates of all sorts do tend to swing (very) roughly in the same direction at (very) roughly the same time... so the concept that interest rates of all types are rising or falling at any given moment is a simplification but not wholly unreasonable. If you want to know which interest rates a particular person is citing to back up their claim you really need to ask them. "When ""people say"", each person is referring to whatever he/she is looking at.  Interest rates tend to move roughly the same, but often there is a bias regarding long vs. short term.  In the US right now, short term interest rates are very low but there is a lot of chatter saying they will rise in the future.  The differential between long term rates and short term rates is high compared to historical norms, suggesting that the market believes this chatter.  You can also look at the differences in rates between different quality levels.  If the economy is improving, the difference in rate for lower rated debt vs. higher rated debt decreases as people think the chance of businesses failing is decreasing. Right now, any interest rate you look at is well below long term historical averages, so asserting that interest rates are low is quite safe." It refers to the risk free rate of a particular country. Because all other rates are usually pegged to the risk free rate. In US,it is the 30 day treasury rate. In England, it is the LIBOR In Canada, it is the overnight rate at which banks lend money to each other. All of these come under the category of risk free rate.
In the EU, you might be looking for Directive 2000/35/EC (Late Payment Directive). There was a statutory rate, 7% above the European Central Bank main rate. However, this Directive was recently repealed by Directive 2011/7/EU, which sets the statutory rate at ECB + 8%. (Under EU regulations, Directives must be turned into laws by national governments, which often takes several months. So in some EU countries the local laws may still reflect the old Directive. Also, the UK doesn't participate in the Euro, and doesn't follow the ECB rate) &gt; if govt does it's job of keeping some competition in the banking sector, then the rates offered you and me should be near the actual cost to service such loans,   You cannot really believe this.  There is no sector more artificial than banking, and under the current regime there is no such thing as a relation between any interest rates and the cost to service the loans.  Rates have been artificially depressed across the spectrum using every available manipulation, and we are experiencing a coordinated money-printing/government bailout operation on a global scale.  To say that rates anywhere have any relation to the real cost and/or demand for capital is absurd. Question is, what is this number 0.01140924 13.69/12=0.01140924 In addition, how does one come out with the EIR as 13.69% pa? When calculating payments, PV = 9800, N=36 (months), PMT=333.47, results in a rate of 1.140924% per period, and rate of 13.69%/yr. No idea how they claim 7.5% In Excel, type =RATE(36,333.47,-9800,0,0) And you will get 1.141% as the result.  36 = #payments, 333.47 = payment per period, -9800 is the principal (negative, remember this) And the zeros are to say the payments are month end, second zero is the guess.  Edit - I saw the loan is from a Singapore bank. It appears they have different rules on the rates they quote. As quid's answer showed the math, here's the bank's offer page -  The EIR is the rate that we, not just US, but most board members, are used to. I thought I'd offer an example using a 30 year mortgage.   Yo can see above, a 6% fixed rate somehow morphs into a 3.86% AR. No offense to the Singapore bankers, but I see little value in this number. What surprises me most, is that I've not seen this before.  What's baffling is when I change a 15yr term the AP drops to less than half. It's still a 6% loan and there's nothing about it that's 2 percent-ish, in my opinion.  Now we know. Interest rates are always given annually, to make them comparable. If you prefer to calculate the rate or the total interest for the complete time, like 10 years or 15 years or 30 years, it is simple math, and it tells you the total you will pay, but it is not helpful for picking the better or even the right offer for your situation. Compare it to your car's gas mileage- what sense does it make to provide the information that a car will use 5000 gallons of gas over its lifetime? Is that better than a car that uses 6000 gallons (but may live 2 years longer?) These are yields for the government bonds. EuroZone interest rates are much lower (10 times lower, in fact) than the UK (GBP zone) interest rates. The rates are set by the central banks. Since 1971, mortgage interest rates have never been more than .25% below current rates (3.6%).  Even restricting just to the last four years, rates have been as much as .89% higher.  Overall, we're much closer to the record low interest rate than any type of high.  We're currently at a three-year low.   Yes, we should expect interest rates to go up.  Eventually.  Maybe when that happens, bonds will fall.  It hasn't happened yet though.  In fact, there remain significant worries that the Fed has been overly aggressive in raising rates (as it was around 2008).  The Brexit side effects seem to be leaning towards an easing in monetary policy rather than a tightening. All unsubstantiated opinions.   &gt;there is no such thing as a relation between any interest rates and the cost to service the loans  Really. No relation whatsoever? And your background in finance letting you understand this is what?  Are you telling me every bank of the [7,213](http://www2.fdic.gov/idasp/) independent banks are in cahoots and none of them compete based on prices and services?  Can you give me precise evidence that all those independent banks are not in competition? What should the price be for capital if the current prices are incorrect, and tell me why. That's not what he's saying at all.  Basically most of his argument (4 of 6 points) is the connection between bond prices and equity prices. It's not particularly interesting but it definitely doesn't always apply either. If bond yields fall, then so too should equity earnings yields if spreads remain relatively constant, i.e. higher equity prices. Additionally, if bond yields are low, then any future equity growth gets capitalized at a much higher value because discount rates are much lower. Again, not particularly insightful.  The two interesting comments were about oil and cash as a % of assets at financial institutions. Both of these are likely linked to falling or low rates above, because banks can't invest profitably at low rates and hence hold cash and equivalents instead, and oil prices are more likely to fall in a low or falling inflation environment (implied by the low rates or Fed tightening).  Really, I think hes's saying something more obvious but not necessarily trivial, which is if one asset class goes up, so too is another related one. "These rates are so low because the cost of money is so low. Specifically, two rates are near zero.  The Federal Reserve discount rate, which is ""the interest rate charged to commercial banks and other depository institutions on loans they receive from their regional Federal Reserve Bank's lending facility--the discount window."" The effective federal funds rate, which is the rate banks pay when they trade balances with each other through the Federal Reserve. Banks want to profit on the loans they make, like mortgage loans. To do so, they try to maximize the difference between the rates they charge on mortgages and other loans (revenue), and the rates they pay savings account holders, the Federal Reserve or other banks to obtain funds (expenses). This means that the rates they offer to pay are as close to these rates as possible. As the charts shows, both rates have been cut significantly since the start of the recession, either through open market operations (the federal funds rate) or directly (the discount rate). The discount rate is set directly by the regional Federal Reserve banks every 14 days.   In most cases, the federal funds rate is lower than the discount rate, in order to encourage banks to lend money to each other instead of borrowing it from the Fed. In the past, however, there have been rare instances where the federal funds rate has exceeded the discount rate, and it's been cheaper for banks to borrow money directly from the Fed than from each other." You'd likely be most familiar with them with respect to options and futures on commodities but they're used for credit/interest as well. The intrinsic value of an option is *derived* from the spread between call/put price and strike price; the value of the contract I've paid for or sold is derived from the current market value of the underlying asset, be it rice, platinum, or the Swedish kroner "Let's talk interest rates on your junk bonds. Even after all that the US has been through (and is still going through), the United States dollar is widely regarded as one of the safest safe havens for your money. As such it serves as a de facto baseline against which all other investments can be measured, the bar everyone has to pass: if you could earn 4% on a 5-year US Treasury bond, or earn 4% on anything else over the next 5 years, you pick the Treasury bond. In many ways this means that the interest rate on a Treasury bond is the closest single measure we have to the price of money all by itself. If someone is loaning you money, they could be loaning it to the Treasury instead; they are losing out by making this loan to you, and must charge you at least this rate just to break even. But most people/governments/countries aren't as credit-worthy as the US Treasury. A few are (the US treasury isn't magical, after all, just really good at what it does), but generally they are not. There is a possibility when loaning money to these entities that you will not get your money back. That is risk. All entities have some risk (even the US treasury!), and some have more than others; ""junk bonds"" have a somewhat elevated level of this risk. Now, you don't just take a risk on for free (unless you're being charitable or something, but I hope you can find better beneficiaries of charity than the average junk bond). You need to be compensated for that risk. Lenders will demand compensation commensurate with that risk - or they will just walk away without making any loans or buying any bonds because it's not worth it. The difference between the interest rate on a US Treasury bond and the interest rate on another bond, such as a junk bond, is the risk premium - the cost of carrying that risk. Therefore you can see that the interest rate on a junk bond is the price of money plus the risk premium. Now, the Federal Reserve adjusts the price of money from time to time, by buying and selling US Treasury bonds until the price is something they like. This means that one component of interest rate on a junk bond is the interest rate on the US Treasury bond, and it is effectively controlled by the Federal Reserve (through that layer of indirection). The other component of the interest rate on a junk bond is the risk premium. It's not generally possible to know in advance whether or not some company will actually default. People have to guess, and decide how comfortable they are taking that risk. This means that risk is more expensive (and interest rates are higher) when they think the companies in question are going through some hard times, and risk will also be more expensive when people decide that they can't take as many risks (perhaps they've already lost some money and need to take additional steps to protect the rest). It's definitely very hard for an individual to decide what the risk on a particular bond is. The good news is that you generally don't have to. There are a bunch of rich jerks, hedge funds, retirement funds, insurance companies, and other investment entities out there who spend all day looking at things like bonds, trying to estimate the risk. Their willingness to exploit minuscule differences between the interest rate on a bond and the real risk means that the average bond on the market will be fairly priced, according to what all those people think. Plenty of them can still be wrong, mind you (cf. mortgage-backed securities) but in the general case the price of any security reflects all the information everyone in the world has on it on average, so if you're wrong you're in good company. When you buy a nice diversified bond fund, you have access to a bunch of bonds at a pretty-standard price.  So that's interest rates for you. But you asked about prices. As it turns out, they're the same thing! - just expressed slightly differently.  One way or another a bond is essentially meant to be a stream of payments worth a certain amount in the end - this is why you'll hear them referred to sometimes as a ""fixed-income security"". The interest rate is essentially the difference between the price you pay now, and the value you receive later, except expressed as a rate. Technically, you could structure the bonds differently (e.g. does the bond pay little bits of interest as you go along, or just pay one big lump sum in the end?) but you can use Math to convert between these two situations, and figure out how much money is worth which when, so it doesn't really matter. Anyway. This means that rising interest rates means lower bond prices on bonds you already own (and falling interest rates means higher bond prices). So if the Federal Reserve increases interest rates, the face value of your bond funds will fall. Also, if people think that the companies issuing the bonds are too risky, the face value of those bonds will also fall. (You were probably expecting the latter effect, though.) Mind you, you will still get the same amount of future money out of them as you would otherwise: that's why they're fixed-income securities. However, a higher interest rate means ""I can get more money in the future for less money now"", and so people will be willing to pay you less for your bond in the present. This is known as interest rate risk. It is higher on longer term bonds, because those have more time to earn interest." I know that assets like bonds have prices that have an inverse relationship with interest rates, but what other assets do as well? I'm a bit new to finance and all that so I'm trying to learn. Would real estate prices be high as well? If so, why? The prime rate is the interest rate banks use amongst themselves to lend money to each other only. It is used as the basis (sometimes) for what interest rate banks charge you.  The prime rate is based loosely on the Fed rate.  There is a committee that meets regularly to set this and other industry interest rates. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_rate I am not 100% positive the following is totally accurate The banks keep our deposits and pay us interest for doing so.  They are paying us interest because they take yours, mine and everybody elses deposits as a large lump sum and invest that money.  Sometimes as business loans, sometimes as mortgages and sometimes as credit card. The banks have a book of business that will be EXACTLY how much credit they have extended to everybody.  But they do not keep that amount of cash in the vaults, only some smaller percentage of that large amount.  When I use my credit card and they need to transfer money to amazon.com, if they don't happen to have enough cash that day, they will just borrow from another bank that does, and the interest rate they pay to do so is the prime rate.  Since they are paying interest on the money they borrow to pay the debt I charged because they told me my credit was worth so much (...???...) they charge me a little bit more than that. Hence your credit card or mortgage's APR being based on the prime rate. I THINK that is what they do  If I am wrong leave a comment and I will update, or the mods can. That's just factually incorrect.   Outright lying aside, the previously mentioned contraction is after after a 2.1% Q4 and clocked in just .2% below last year's national average (a five year low). Regardless of that tiny bit of logic, the Fed has forecast a 2.9% Q2.  Full employment and highest consumer confidence in years are driving it.   Even worse case in that article, the forecasts are above 2.5% for the next quarter. The way I handle clothing purchases, is I save a little bit with each paycheck but don't commit to spending each month.  I wait until I find the exact item I need or know I will need in the near future.  I have a list of things to look for so I don't get off track and blow my budget.  And each time I consider hitting Starbucks or buying a random something at Target, I think which is a better investment - a great pair of pants that will work for me for a decade, or a latte? Thank you for linking to me.  Your question is one many people have.  I feel that clothing should be purchased slowly, with care.  If you do it this you will buy items that don't need to be replaced every two years, and will maintain style and quality longer. :)