Reading about investing, I heard about how some country’s banks actually have negative interest rates, as ridiculous as that sounds. Well here you go: NIRP in the US].
Here’s what I don’t get. This is supposed to be something being considered to “solve our problem”. Yet the stock markets appears to be soaring to all time highs. So what problem is this meant to address? The rich aren’t getting richer fast enough? The article does mentioned NIR is supposed to get consumers and businesses to spend. I think that’s the bottom line. Consumers aren’t spending because they don’t have the money to spend, and this stupid trickle down just doesn’t work, the rich spending doesn’t trickle down. Just exasperating.
Reading about investing, I heard about how some country's banks actually have negative interest rates, as ridiculous as that sounds. Well here you go: NIRP in the US]. Here's what I don't get. This is supposed to be something being considered to "solve our problem".Seems the Fed is past solving problems, now they are simply treading desperately trying to keep our heads above water. The Stock Exchanges, seems to me a system that's only concerned with maximizing profits and minimizing exposure to inconvenient externalities - isn't much of a gauge for what's really happening in the economy.
You are 100% correct. The trickle down of the stimulus program did not work this time. To many regulations, taxes and fees, nobody wants to be an employer today.
My views on the banking.
If you are a big major bank connected to the Federal Reserve and you have loans that you are getting 6% to 8% interest on. Do you want to bundle the bank’s loans and sell the bundles on Wall Street for a 3% to 4% cash out? Or do you want to keep the loan in house? If you keep the loans there is a windfall of profit for your bank. You borrow the money from the government at 0.1%, a tenth of a percent. So why on earth would you want to pay your bank depositors to use their money? You don’t, so to get around the banking rules, you make your interest paid to your depositors unattractive. By going in to the negative you can make money off the depositors by having them pay to put money into your bank.
What the article is talking about is that European banks were paying a negative amount to depositors. Their situation is a lot different than ours. And this is not in the article of course. But Europe changed over to the Euro. The Euro is mostly digital money. But the timeline on European banking is that German banks were the biggest loaners to European countries for big money projects. And Europe was headed for an economic recession and the German banks were going to get hurt badly. But the first thing the new Euro did was to buy out all the bad loans from the German banks. So why the other countries would sit by and let Germany get away with that? Well, it was because the major banks of the European countries had stacks of old bonds in their bank vaults that were worthless. Many of the bonds were over one hundred years old and there was no way that one could collect on them. The countries used these bonds to prop up their asset values on the books. Germany agreed to have the new Euro that was to be printed buy these worthless bonds. In other words with the trillions of new Euro money, the bankers greed was in play.
In Frankfort, the Germans worked 24 hours, seven days a week all winter to build the new Euro center that employees over eight thousand workers. The two big players are the Deutsche Bank AG and the Deutsche Bundesbank, the central bank of the Federal Republic of Germany. From this center the Germans control the European money, thus they control Europe. Think about it. Who owns the money? In Europe it is the government, which is why they are trying to do away with paper money and go all digital. Then they will have better control of the money.
The use of power of the control of money was seen when large depositors in Cyprus lost 47.5% of their money to the government who was following the wishes of the new Euro government. The banks are in some situations telling people in the Euro when they can get their money out of the bank and how much they can remove and any given time. Basically in Europe you end up giving 2.5% of all banking transactions to the banks now. England disagreed with paying money to the German banks for banking done in England. England proved it was illegal and the banks had no power to implement the fees. The banks had to agree and created a big paper process where if you filled out all the paperwork and applied to the proper authorities (the bank) then you could get your fees refunded. Not real surprised that England bailed out of the Euro. I think the powers in England were fed up with the German overlords.
That said, the point being – why should the banks pay you interest on (yours or is it their) money, when they view that the government has put them in control of the money. They seem to be digitally printing the money and they pay 0.1% for the money and can buy government bond that pay 5%. Why do they need the hassle of dealing with the public, other than to keep status quo.
MY - So if I understand you, you’re saying moving to a NIR would be a move to help banks even more?