German newspaper Der Spiegel reported yesterday that the Bavarian Banking Association has recommended that its member banks start stockpiling PHYSICAL CASH.
Europe, of course, has been battling with negative interest rates for quite some time.
What this means is that commercial banks are being charged interest for holding wholesale deposits at the European Central Bank.
In order to generate artificial economic growth, the ECB wants banks to make as many loans as possible, no matter how stupid or idiotic.
They believe that economic growth is simply a function of loans. The more money that’s loaned out, the more the economy will grow.
This is the sort of theory that works really well in an economic textbook. But it doesn’t work so well in a history textbook.
Cheap money encourages risky behavior. It gives banks an incentive to give ‘no money down’ loans to homeless people with no employment history.
It creates bubbles (like the housing bubble from 10 years ago), and ultimately, financial panics (like the banking crisis from 8 years ago).
Banks are supposed to be conservative, responsible managers of other people’s money.
When central bank policies penalize that practice, bad things tend to happen.
Traditionally when a commercial bank in Europe wants to play it safe with its customers’ funds, they would hold excess reserves on deposit with the European Central Bank.
In the past, they might even have been paid interest on those excess reserves as an extra incentive to be conservative.
Now it’s the exact opposite. If a bank holds excess reserves on deposit at the ECB to ensure that they have a greater margin of safety, they must now pay 0.3% to the ECB.
That’s what it means to have negative interest rates. And for the bank, this eats into their profits, especially when they have tens of billions in excess reserves.
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