Long-term interest rates refer to government bonds maturing in ten years. Rates are mainly determined by the price charged by the lender, the risk from the borrower and the fall in the capital value. Long-term interest rates are generally averages of daily rates, measured as a percentage. These interest rates are implied by the prices at which the government bonds are traded on financial markets, not the interest rates at which the loans were issued.

In all cases, they refer to bonds whose capital repayment is guaranteed by governments. Long-term interest rates are one of the determinants of business investment. Low long term interest rates encourage investment in new equipment and high interest rates discourage it. Investment is, in turn, a major source of economic growth

See definition: https://data.oecd.org/interest/long-term-interest-rates.htm

It is also possible to get the data from the Global Macro Database (GMDB) by setting the gmdb_source to True.

Both sources return the rate as a decimal fraction per annum (0.0357 for 3.57%), so the two are directly interchangeable. Only the OECD source supports monthly and quarterly frequency; the GMDB is annual only, so the period argument has no effect when gmdb_source is True.

Changed in v2.2.0: the GMDB source previously returned percentage points (3.57 for 3.57%) while the OECD source returned a decimal fraction. The GMDB series is now divided by 100 so both sources agree; divide any hard-coded comparison by 100.

Also known as: 10-year yield, government bond rate, long-term yield.

No programming experience? With the Finance Toolkit MCP server, AI assistants such as Claude and ChatGPT can calculate the Long Term Interest Rate for you. Just ask in plain English.

Calculate the Long Term Interest Rate in Python

The Long Term Interest Rate is available in the Economics module of the open-source Finance Toolkit. Install it with:

pip install financetoolkit -U

Then call get_long_term_interest_rate as shown below.

from financetoolkit import Economics

economics = Economics(start_date='2023-05-01', end_date='2023-12-31')

economics.get_long_term_interest_rate(
    countries=['Japan', 'United States', 'Brazil'],
    gmdb_source=False,
    period='monthly'
)

Which returns:

  Japan United States Brazil
2023-05 0.0043 0.0357 0.0728
2023-06 0.004 0.0375 0.0728
2023-07 0.0059 0.039 0.07
2023-08 0.0064 0.0417 0.07
2023-09 0.0076 0.0438 0.07
2023-10 0.0095 0.048 0.0655
2023-11 0.0066 0.045 0.0655
2023-12 0.0062 0.0402 0.0655

Parameters

get_long_term_interest_rate accepts the following parameters:

  • countries (list[str] | str | None, optional): The countries to include in the data. Defaults to None.
  • period (str | None, optional): Whether to return the monthly, quarterly or the annual data.
  • gmdb_source (bool | None, optional): Whether to get the data from the Global Macro Database (GMDB).
  • rolling (int, optional): The rolling window size to use for smoothing the data (simple moving average). Defaults to None.
  • trailing (int, optional): The trailing window size to use for summing the data over trailing periods (e.g. a trailing-4-quarter sum). Defaults to None.
  • growth (bool, optional): Whether to return the growth data or the actual data.
  • lag (int, optional): The number of periods to lag the data by.
  • standardize (bool, optional): Whether to standardize (Z-Score) the result. When combined with growth=True, standardizes the growth values instead of the raw values. Defaults to False.
  • rounding (int | None, optional): The number of decimals to round the results to. Defaults to None.
Money Supply Central Bank Policy Rate Short Term Interest Rate Real Interest Rate Yield Curve Slope Real Yield Curve (TIPS) Breakeven Inflation Expectations 30-Year Mortgage Rate

The Economics module page introduces the module, and the sidebar lists all of its functions.

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