> Our economy promotes short-term gains and not long-term initiatives; I blame over 30 years of artificially-low interest rates for this.

Don't low interest rates promote long-term thinking, perhaps to an absurd degree (e.g. the "it's okay that we hemorrhage money price dumping for 10 years as long as we develop a monopoly" playbook)? Bigger interest rate = bigger discount for present value of a future reward.

I'm guessing that they're referring to the practice of investors borrowing with low interest rates to buy large amounts of stock in a company, then milking the company of all its value for short term gains. Unless there's a significant plan in place, many companies can't really get away with long term playbooks if they are responsible to shareholders using ownership for short term gains (so they can quickly move to the next money making asset).