Bidding a hard farewell to cheap money

The first rise in US interest rates in almost a decade has been long overdue. After leading the world economy into seven years of super cheap money, it is urgent that the world's largest economy assume its duty to blaze a trail out of the dangerous lifestyle of zero interest rates.

The lost two decades of the Japanese economy, once the world's second largest, have only proved the ineffectiveness of excessively loose monetary policies in tackling fundamental structural problems. If the United States can manage to maintain robust growth with normalized interest rates in the coming years, it will give a huge boost to the confidence of policymakers in many other countries who have also resorted to cheap money as economic painkillers.

But if the US economy fails to cope with a gradual rise in its interest rates strongly enough, other countries may need to not only prepare for increasing uncertainties but also rethink the cost of cheap money.