Gareth Hutchins

You see them quite quickly.

So about 70% of mortgages in Australia are on variable rates.

In the UK, it's about 20%.

In the United States, it's less than 5%.

So again, it's specific to Australian conditions.

But an interesting thing is that one of the authors of this IMF working paper is an RBA economist.

One of the up-and-comers, he writes a lot of these really interesting papers.

And so he's got that insight into Australian data.

It's not just written by economists from overseas.

And one interesting thing about this is that, so once you start to understand that interest rates are, you can think of them in terms of time.

if they're lifting an interest rate, they're not just taking more money from you, they're taking time itself from you because you're going to have to work harder in order to pay off that extra money that you're handing over to the bank in the higher interest payments.

And in this situation, you literally have people handing over more of their time because they're taking on second or third jobs or they're entering the labour force itself.

If you want to teach somebody an example of how interest rates equals your personal time, you couldn't find a greater example.