It’s been ages since the Federal Reserve last raised interest rates. Who remembers how that works? (Certainly not me, I was a baby reporter covering airlines back then) Here are some excerpts:

At least at the junior end, Wall Street is now peppered with traders and investors who possess no first-hand professional experience of an interest rate rise. Even for finance veterans, the habit of measuring one’s profit and loss on a day-to-day basis leads to notoriously goldfish-like memory spans and it has been six years since rates were last above the zero bound.

…

Years of ultra-low interest rates have become integrated into the very fabric of markets. Asset managers live and die by their interest rate bets. Hundreds of billions of dollars have poured into riskier asset classes as investors seek out higher returns with borrowed money, or leverage, used to amplify profits.

Markets display total recoil on Fed interest rate rises