If you bought a home in October 1981 and took a 30-year fixed mortgage, the interest rate on your loan would have been just shy of 19 percent. That might be cold comfort to homebuyers today who are looking at rates that are creeping up to their highest level in a year, but it does offer some perspective on where we are as an economy.

Mortgage rates – the one metric most people can relate to in the conversation about the Fed raising the prime rate – are inching close to 5 percent for a 30-year fixed, and after this week’s anticipated vote that number might move even higher.

That will likely lead to all sorts of handwringing – home values could start to slide as buyers balk at paying higher rates on loans – but, as noted above, it could sure be a lot worse.

Indeed, the commercial and investment bankers we spoke to for this week’s Banking & Finance Quarterly largely shrugged off the anticipated increase. Commercial banks are already baking the increase into their lending (generating a bit more cash while they can still borrow from the Fed at near zero) and investment bankers are focused on deal quality, not a fractional increase in the cost of money.

We’d all like to see the continued expansion that has brought unemployment under 5 percent and to see gross domestic product growth exceed the 3.2 percent that was hit at the end of the last quarter. An incremental tick here and there in interest rates is unlikely to bring those gears to a halt.

As Jim Freedman, chairman of Intrepid Investment Bankers, pointed out to us, “The market continues to be robust. I don’t think capital is going away (as) interest rates rise a little bit.”

If you really want to worry about growth, better to think about how we treat our trading partners. Navigating the protection of jobs here while avoiding a trade war is far more important than whether interest rates move slowly higher. And if that gets botched, 1981 might not look so bad.