The news has has several stories recently about banks contacting clients and asking them if they would like to come off their tracker mortgage and instead go on a fixed rate or even a variable rate. The assertion is that if you have a fixed rate during a downturn that you are ‘protected’ from changes in the ECB rate changes.
That is true, but you are also protecting yourself from upside advantage. In a nutshell, during a downturn there are some monetarist moves that Central Banks will make, such as dropping rates to increase the movement of money in an economy, if you are on a fixed rate you don’t get the rate reduction and the outlook for at least the near future is that rates are going to come down. On those grounds alone you would have to question the rationale of a …