In “Paranormal” Europe, Banks Will Pay You To Borrow, And Charge You To Save
A month ago, we wrote about a bizarre situation involving Denmark’s now totally broken monetary system, where as a result of an unprecedented scramble to weaken the currency in order to preserve the peg to the Euro the central bank unleashed a historic rate-cutting scramble, where in 4 consecutive rate cuts its pushed the interest rate to an unheard of -0.75% (while at the same time being the first modern central bank to unveil what we dubbed “Bizarro Backdoor QE“). The culmination of this series of events was the surreal realization by some debtors that the bank would now pay them the interest on their new or existing mortgage.
The insanity was only compounded when one considers that in the vast majority of European countries, depositors are already (or will soon) pay for the “privilege” of providing banks with unsecured funds (in the US, JPM recently also started charging some customers – mostly corporate and hedge funds- for holding their deposits).
In short, this is what Europe has become: savers – those who diligently put away the fruits of their labor – are now forced to pay, using banks as an intermediary, and subsidize the the debtor: spenders, who live beyond their means, and who in increasingly more frequent situations are now paid to take out even more debt! Call it monetary socialism.
Which is probably why with a one month delay, none other than the NYT decided to cover precisely this topic with “In Europe, Bond Yields and Interest Rates Go Through the Looking Glass.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
