Risks and rewards: Rates heading up in US and down in Europe

The U.S. economy is looking healthier — a diagnosis likely to be confirmed on Friday, when the U.S. Labor Department reports on job creation and unemployment in November.

On Thursday, the ECB cut a key interest rate and extended a bond-buying program through at least March 2017.

The moves are meant to raise excessively low inflation, ease borrowing costs and prod consumers and businesses to borrow and spend.

To get banks to lend, the ECB is actually penalizing them — more than it did before — for parking money at the central bank.

In December 2008, at the lowest depths of the financial crisis, Fed policymakers cut the short-term rate they control to a record low near zero.

[...] the financial crisis has long since passed.

[...] the unemployment rate has reached a seven-year low 5 percent, pretty much at the level the Fed considers full employment.

In testimony Thursday to Congress' Joint Economic Committee, Chair Janet Yellen reiterated that the Fed would likely begin raising rates at its next meeting, Dec. 15-16, barring a surprise shock that undermines confidence.

A rate hike, Yellen said, would amount to a testament ... to how far our economy has come in recovering from the effects of the financial crisis and the Great Recession.

If the Fed waited too long and allowed inflation to get out of control or allowed dangerous bubbles to form in assets such as real estate, it might have to raise rates "abruptly" and "perhaps even inadvertently push the economy into recession."

Rising U.S. rates will likely lure global investors into dollar-denominated Treasurys in search of higher returns.

According to the World Bank, exports accounted for just 13.5 percent of U.S economic activity in 2013, one of the lowest shares in the world.