Weekly Viz 2023-09-18
Worldwide Interest Rate
To control inflation, interest rate in the US has been increasing in the past year and may continue so. This week, the dataset I visualized is the interest rates around the world. The original data can be found at Trading Economics.
My Visualization
This visualization looks like a “petal chart”. It is created by a line chart on the country level between a starting point (0) and an end point (length depending on the interest rate). We first determine the angle of each line based on the ranking of interest rates, then calculate the position of each point based on the angle and interst rate (the higher the interest rate is, the longer the line would be).
Please notice that all the visualizations are designed for desktop view, so it is recommended to view them on a desktop device.
Insights
- The range of interest rates is very large – the highest interest rate is 150% in Zimbabwe, and the lowest interest rate is -0.1% (yes, negative) in Japan;
- 75% of the countries have an interest rate below 10%, and 50% of the countries have an interest rate between 4.5% and 10.0%;
- Interest rate is a common tool to adjust inflation rate. Generally speaking, when inflation rate is skyhigh, the interest rate would also be very high (as seen in Zimbabwe and Argentina); but when the government wants to stimulate spending, it will lower the interest rate, and even make the interest rate negative, as is seen in Japan.
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