Free market economist Richard Ebeling points out that when adjusted for inflation, the Federal Funds rate set by the Federal Reserve & also one-year U.S. Treasury not yields have been negative for the last several years already .. “It has cost little or almost nothing to borrow funds in the American financial markets, courtesy of the former chairman Ben Bernanke and current chairwoman Janet Yellen and the other members of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, who possess the monopoly manipulation authority over the quantity of money in the banking system.” .. highlights how the U.S. government has added $8 Trillion to the federal government’s accumulated debt since the financial crisis – “The cost of U.S. government debt payments would be far greater if the Federal Reserve had not kept interest rates artificially low and created the illusion that the interest cost of government borrowing can be almost ignored.” .. these repressed interest rates (financial repression) have caused malinvestment, mispricing of assets & risk, & shafted savers & retirees from earning interest on their savings .. “A healthy restoration of actual market stability and coordination between savings and investment, between supplies and demands, requires an end to the monetary expansion and the reemergence of market-based interest rates that can tell the truth about the availability and cost of borrowing money and the real resources they are supposed to represent, so investments undertaken stay within the bounds or types and time-durations consistent with the saved means of production upon which they are dependent .. While the Federal Reserve has chosen to keep the Federal Funds rate near zero, it is merely delaying the inescapable and inevitable result of its own monetary policy – another needed economic correction that its actions will have generated but which it will, no doubt, blame on the supposed ‘failures’ of the market economy.”