See: Term Loan. See: Yield Curve.
"Term" here is the duration or amount of time between now and when a loan comes due.
Notionally, and normally, loans due sooner carry a lower interest rate than loans due far away in time. Why? Risk. When there exist only three months from now until a loan is due, it's really easy to take a credit snapshot and determine whether the borrower is money good...or not. The variability of the world's credit situation is way less over three months than it is over 30 years. So it's this "term structure" of interest rates, i.e. the risk-adjusted pricing of the cost of renting money...that derives the yield curve.
Key notion: longer duration: usually more risky, hence higher interest rates...more "terms" under which to pay it off, with each term adding risk and uncertainty. Shorter duration: the opposite.
Related or Semi-related Video
Finance: What is Term To Maturity?12 Views
finance a la shmoop what is term to maturity alright people well it's kind
of a lifecycle of a bond like a bond is issued or sold it has an assay a 15 year [Bond timeline appears]
duration somebody's written that money for 15 years its term to maturity when
it first was issued was 15 years but if you bought that bond nine years into it
some you know maturation process when all the hairs growing in funny places [Hairs grow out of bond]
then at that point it would have six years current maturity well what goes on
between these years interest payments and then eventually at the very end the
issuer pays back the principal to the investor who bought the bond and [Money transfers from issuer to investor]
everyone goes away happy-ish well bonds carry gradations in short medium and
long term terms to maturity like short term generally is considered one to five [Different types of bond appear]
years mid term medium term and something like that is like five to a dozen years
and long term is like up to you know thirty or even a hundred years after
that dozen or so no hard lines here they're all dotted and yeah Disney [Man discussing bonds at DisneyLand]
actually sold a hundred year bonds at one point and they are of course the
happiest bonds on earth [Disney bonds appear]
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