In a speech to the American Economics Association’s annual meeting, Fed vice chair Stanley Fischer asked some important questions and provided few explicit answers. (He admits this himself; it’s not a reader’s uncharitable judgment.) Much of it is inspired by the zero lower bound (ZLB), but Fischer’s attention roams widely around from that starting point.

His first stop is the possibility that we’re moving towards a world with a “permanently lower long-run equilibrium interest rate,” aka r*. We’ve always been skeptical of that concept, for a number of reasons. You can’t see it, and every attempt to estimate it statistically winds up with different results. Maybe there are several points of equilibrium—a high-employment and a low-employment equilibrium, for example. Or maybe something as turbulent as a modern capitalist economy has no point that’s durably stable enough to deserve the name equilibrium.

But we don’t have seats on the FOMC, so we must bracket these concerns. A number of recent empirical efforts have found that r* is close to zero, and this empirical work has found theoretical support in Lawrence Summers’ argument that we are in a state of secular stagnation. When combined with low inflation, interest rates will spend a lot of time at or near the zero line, which makes life very difficult for central bankers.

What to do? One option is to raise the inflation target from the semi-official 2% to some unspecified higher level. To Fischer, this is risky business, and it seems to hold little appeal for him. Another possibility is to adopt negative interest rates—a strategy that some European countries have experimented with—but Fischer also finds this problematic, at least in the short term.

A third approach, about which Fischer says nothing negative (unlike most of his other propositions) is raising r* through expansionary fiscal policy. “In particular,” he observes, “the need for more modern infrastructure in many parts of the American economy is hard to miss. And we should not forget that additional effective investment in education also adds to the nation’s capital.” It might be possible to manipulate the yield curve, allowing short rates to rise for the sake of normal policy and money market functioning while keeping economically sensitive long rates down. That could be accomplished through continued long-term asset purchases by the Fed and a shortening of maturities by the Treasury.

Central bankers are expected to be discreet, and Fischer is well-practiced. But occupationally adjusted, he’s calling for a more stimulative fiscal policy to counter what could be a bout of long-term economic stagnation. There’s certainly room to boost public investment: as the graph on p. 5 shows, after depreciation, civilian public investment hasn’t been this low since the World War II mobilization.

Fischer stepped out of normal central bankerly discretion to endorse raising rates to prick an asset bubble, a controversial position in the trade. While he thought macro-prudential tools might be appropriate—capital requirements, or restrictions on loan-to-value ratios—the Fed doesn’t have the freedom to wield such tools that its foreign counterparts have. So, “if asset prices across the economy…are thought to be excessively high, raising the interest rate may be the appropriate step,” he concluded. One awaits the declassification of FOMC transcripts to see what Fischer is saying behind those big wooden doors—and how his colleagues are reacting.

Although Fischer said in the speech that r* was likely to stay low “for the policy-relevant future,” he disclosed on Wednesday that the markets are wrong if they’re only expecting two rate hikes this year. Of course, four quarter-point hikes would amount to just a single percentage point, which isn’t all that far from zero.

All evidence suggests to us that when the FOMC finally takes its first long-anticipated step, it will be to take us away from the zero bound, not because they fear the economy is getting too hot, or that there is any real danger of wage inflation, let alone unaggregated healthy wage growth.

In the fall of 2012, current and former Federal Reserve officials, as well as closely affiliated academics, made it clear the central bank is currently “confronted…with a situation that was regarded a few decades ago as merely a theoretical curiosity”: the zero bound.

In one of those papers John Woolford, former member of the New York Fed’s Monetary Policy Advisory Council (and the source of that quote) raised questions about the effectiveness of balance-sheet policies, advocating instead for forward guidance, while acknowledging the danger in central bankers talking too much. Other papers questioned quantitative easing’s ability to do anything about the unemployment rate, noted that the Fed may have fewer options than it suggests, and rang the warning bell on trying to correct macro-economic problems that have historically been addressed through fiscal and monetary policy by monetary policy alone, a bell former Chair Bernanke starting ringing before he left office. Chicago Fed President Charles Evans urged the FOMC to articulate what needs to be done as a first step toward pushing for the fiscal and monetary policies he deemed necessary to get us past the zero bound.

Evans also urged the Fed to adopt a 7/3 policy, where they would maintain their current policy as long as unemployment remained above 7% and inflation below 3%, which he called “an important improvement on current communication policy.”

Better communication policy perhaps, but it would still have left the FOMC in the same position it finds itself in today: we’ve crossed the unemployment rate threshold, but not the inflation bar.

Only the most reckless daredevil would enjoy spending so much time pushed up against the zero bound, but the way out remains the subject of contentious debate and reams of research. The vehemence of the debate, perhaps more of a slugfest, is fueled by the fact that on the other side of the scale, the fiscal side, we have a largely dysfunctional and distrusted government. We’re trying to hash out what should be considered national priorities in a dust-up about fiscal policy.

Somewhat humorously, the zero-bound is succeeding where our political system is failing: general discontent has given us some pretty strange bedfellows. The more hawkish voices of course want a more aggressive policy, and are being joined by a growing number of more progressive types who’d like to see corporations making money the hard way—developing new ventures and investing in labor and productivity—instead of through the financial engineering enabled by extremely  low rates.

In a 2013 paper, “QE and ultra-low interest rates: Distributional effects and risks,” McKinsey estimated that in the US, the UK, and the Eurozone governments had garnered about $1.6 trillion while households lost about $630 billion in net interest income by the end of 2012. The authors note that some of those governmental profits fueled the automatic stabilizers, and broke out demographic groups by age, not income. The young were gainers and the old, losers. For households under age 35 who are net borrowers, the gain from lower rates has averaged $1,500 a year; for 35–44, $1,700. But older households with significant interest-bearing assets were losers. Those aged 65–74, -$1,900, and over 75, -$2,700. For the oldest group, that was a hit of 6% of income; for the youngest, a gain of almost 3%. 

They note that non-financial corporations also benefitted, by about $710B, but that had yet to translate into investment, probably because the recession lowered demand expectations. At the time they reckoned the benefit boosted profits by about 5%, one-fourth of the gain since 2007. McKinsey argues that effects of near-zero rates on asset prices were "ambiguous,” but at least in the recent U.S. instance, we’re not really convinced.

As logic would predict, they forecast a reversal of these benefits as interest rates rise. Even with large percentages of fixed-rate mortgages, the authors estimate that in the US household debt service could rise by about 7% for each 100-basis-point increase. The younger net debtors would lose the largest benefit, while the older asset holders gain share. The more capital-intensive industries, utilities, manufacturing, extraction, would take the biggest hit, and this was all before oil prices fell, but companies that “use capital productively,” will be rewarded. What a concept.

 And they forecast an increase in market volatility. No genius points for that, but a nice change.

The Federal Reserve’s most recent Survey of Consumer Finances, for 2013, tells us that increased interest income will be narrowly distributed across households. Although most recent data show that 13.8% of households own stocks directly—which rises to 48% if you include mutual funds and the like—only 1.4% of households own bonds directly. The SCF doesn’t report on bonds owned through mutual funds, but applying the indirect/direct ratio prevailing in stocks to bonds gets us only to 5% of households. About 2% of the middle decile owns bonds (9.2% own stocks), and 6.9% in the top decile. The Fed doesn’t even include a number for bond ownership for the lower decile because it’s very tiny, and the authors note that families in the highest 40% of the income distribution own bonds disproportionately, though much of that is savings bonds. “Ownership of any type of bond other than savings bonds is concentrated among the highest tiers of the income and wealth distributions,” they say.

Debts are more equally distributed. Half—52%—of the bottom 20% is in debt; 84% of the top decile. But the top has a leverage ratio (debt/income) of 8%, compared with 19% at the bottom. Leverage ratios are highest in the middle of the distribution.

Really, what jumps out at you putting this stuff together are the details, like the fact that the fraction of young families with education debt increased from 22.4% to 38.8% between 2001 and 2013, and the fraction of middle-income families who  saved fell significantly.