I couldn't find good history of interest rates for CDs or savings specifically. But I did find Federal Reserve H.15 tables for interest rates on 3 month commercial paper.
I got the inflation figures off the BLS site.
For both I'm representing the annual averages of the interest rate and the inflation rate.
Here's a chart showing the interest rate versus inflation for 1997 to 2016:
(click for full size) |
You can see there that the rates paid by banks were quite a bit higher in the not too distant past.
For about the past 10 years we've had interest rates that are pretty low and don't keep up for inflation. But if you look back to the previous 10 years from 1997 to 2006 the opposite was true for many of those years.
Overall for the 20 year period the annual interest rate averaged 2.4% and the inflation rate averaged 2.2%.
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