The Terrifying Truth About Negative Interest Rates
Pushing interest rates below zero is both an act of desperation and something that in theory should have a huge, immediate impact of the behavior of borrowers and savers. The fact that negative rates have become the new normal in big parts of the world but haven’t caused the expected behavior change should scare the hell out of everyone.
To understand why this is so, think of the rate of interest as the price of money. It’s what an individual or business has to pay to get credit with which to buy and invest. As with anything else, when the price of money is high, we tend to acquire less of it and when the price is low we acquire more. So making money not just cheap, not just free, but actually profitable to borrow, while making savings unprofitable to hold should, according to conventional Keynesian economics, create a scene in the credit markets reminiscent of those Black Friday Wal-Mart videos where fistfights break out over the last remaining Barbie Doll. Businesses in particular should be borrowing and investing like crazy, igniting an epic capital spending boom.
But that hasn’t happened. In Europe, for instance, negative rates have been in place for five years …
… and instead of a rip-roaring post-Great Recession recovery, the result has been the kind of anemic growth that conventional economics would predict for a tight-money environment. Business capital spending, the engine that in theory should be propelling Europe’s economy, looks like the opposite of a boom.
This translates into seriously boring GDP growth:
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