Over recent decades, even as public debt was on a secular upgrade, interest rates had been moving in the opposite direction. This was one of the phenomena that moved Larry Summers in 2013 to suggest that we were living in an age of secular stagnation.49 True to the basic supply-and-demand framework, Summers argued that if the price of funds, the interest rate, was falling, it must be due to an imbalance. There was either too much saving or too little investment. Either way, it was a good moment for government investment to take up the slack.
