Reddit reviews Principles of Macroeconomics

In Economics "investing" is investing in capital such as factories, equipment, or training. -- Basically, "new production".

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edited to be more accurate:

From Principles of Macroeconomics by Robert Frank & Ben Bernanke.

>Investment is spending by firms on final goods and services, primarily capital goods. Investment is divided into three subcategories:

>* Business fixed investment is the purchase by firms of new capital goods such as machinery, factories, and office buildings. (Remember that for the purposes of calculating GDP, long-lived capital goods are treated as final goods rather than as intermediate goods.) Firms buy capital goods to increase their capacity to produce.

• Residential investment is construction of new homes and apartment buildings. Recall that homes and apartment buildings, sometimes called residential capital, are also capital goods. For GDP accounting purposes, residential investment is treated as an investment by the business sector, which then sells the homes to households.
  
• Inventory investment is the addition of unsold goods to company inventories. In other words, the goods that a firm produces but doesn't sell during the current period are treated, for accounting purposes, as if the firm had bought those goods from itself. (This convention guarantees that production equals expenditure.) Inventory investment can be positive or negative, depending on whether the value of inventories rises or falls over the course of the year.
  
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  > People often refer to purchases of financial assets, such as stocks or bonds, as "investment." That use of the term is different for the definition we give here. A person who buys a share of a company's stock acquires partial ownership of the existing physical and financial assets controlled by the company. A stock purchase does not usually correspond to the creation of new physical capital, however, and so is not investment in the sense we are using the term.

Umm, what?
I think you are confusing types of interest.

• Interest where a bank pays its liabilities (depositors). This is partly where the banks in Iceland got into trouble, they promised high returns (high interest rates) on the deposits.
  
  
• Interest which a borrow pays the lender. This is where Iceland is having issues. The lenders, generically called the market, have demanded a higher premium for lending Iceland money to cover their deficit spending. Thus, so as to not to take on even higher levels of debt, Iceland appears to have chosen to cut back on spending, based on my observations only.
  
  
• The interest you are referring to in this line
  
  >keeping intrest rates super low for so long has worked wonders in EU & USA, eh?
  
  Is the rate at which the central bank is lending to banks, so that they can predeterminer levels of capital at the close of business each day via market pressures. Thus creating less expensive capital for banks to secure and able to further loan to the greater market at a lower rate.
  
  I could go on, and i may have missed a few items or gotten some wrong, but i have work to do.
  
  Tl;dr: I am going to assume you don't know what you are talking about, please read this

For textbooks, any recommendation would depend on your mathematics background. If you are just starting out (say, high school level calculus background), then this is the book I would suggest.

If you are familiar with more advanced calculus techniques and are decent at mathematics, then I would suggest you try this book.

This is a decent free macro textbook available online. I have only read a couple of chapters of this and its pretty decent for being free.

https://web.archive.org/web/20101119160912/http://www.treasury.gov/education/duties/treas/sec-treasury.shtml

>The Secretary of the Treasury is the principal economic advisor to the President and plays a critical role in policy-making by bringing an economic and government financial policy perspective to issues facing the government. The Secretary is responsible for formulating and recommending domestic and international financial, economic, and tax policy, participating in the formulation of broad fiscal policies that have general significance for the economy, and managing the public debt. The Secretary oversees the activities of the Department in carrying out its major law enforcement responsibilities; in serving as the financial agent for the United States Government; and in manufacturing coins and currency. The Chief Financial Officer Ryan Anderson of the government, the Secretary serves as Chairman Pro Tempore of the President's Economic Policy Council, Chairman of the Boards and Managing Trustee of the Social Security and Medicare Trust Funds, and as U.S. Governor of the International Monetary Fund, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the Inter-American Development Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

I mean...you could go a quick 20-second google search of his job before commenting on it

>Obama didn't set rates, but he set the agenda and appointed the guy who set the rates.

Nope. You should do some studying