Letters: What happens if interest rates rise?

Spinning plates

Sir: Kate Andrews is right to highlight the looming risk of inflation (‘Rishi’s nightmare’, 6 March), but to say that the UK has known barely any inflation for almost a generation misses a very painful point. It may be true for consumer prices. Low interest rates and quantitative easing, along with other ill-advised stimuli, have caused huge inflation over the past two decades in the single greatest expense throughout most working people’s lives: the cost of housing. Along with rash promises such as the triple lock, it has been responsible for a vast transfer of wealth from young to old, from the less well-off to the more affluent, and unlike the 1970s and early 1980s, it has not been accompanied by rampant wider inflation eroding the real-terms debt of mortgage-holders. This makes the threat of interest rate rises all the more dangerous; it is not just the public purse which is alarmingly indebted.