Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen, responding to a letter calling for higher interest rates on behalf of savers, said Americans would have been worse off had the central bank not kept rates near zero since 2008, and repeated that she expects to tighten policy “gradually” after liftoff.

Warning that “an overly aggressive increase in rates would at most benefit savers only temporarily,” she argued in the letter released Monday in Washington that the Fed’s seven-year era of zero rates had sheltered American savers from dramatic declines in the value of their homes and retirement accounts.

Read the article “Yellen Defends Seven Years of Low Interest Rates in Letter to Nader” on bloomberg.com.