Tag Archives: Negative Rates

The Federal Reserve’s TRUE Dual Mandate! Taylor Rule Suggests Target Rate Of -8.58% As Federal Spending Rages Out Of Control

(Anthony B. Sanders) The Federal Reserve has a dual mandate: stable inflation and low unemployment. Well, core inflation is currently at 1.2% (core PCE growth is at only 0.95%) and unemployment (thanks to Covid-19) is at 11.1%. Not quite on target.

The Taylor Rule model using an aggressive specification suggests that The Fed lower their target rate to -8.58%.

Of course, Congressional spending is out of control with mandatory spending (entitlement programs, such as Social Security, Medicare, and required interest spending on the federal debt) since the days of George HW Bush and Bill Clinton. And especially post financial crisis.

Of course, mandatory spending on Medicare is soaring out of control.

Defense outlays are projected to grow with non-defense outlays declining,

Of course, the TRUE dual mandate of The Federal Reserve is propping up the S&P 500 index and NASDAQ.

Good luck to everyone trying to cope with out of control Congressional spending and Fed money printing.

The question is … will Congress and President Trump/Biden reign in their prodigious spending after Covid-19 passes?

Here is my answer. Where are the Budget Hawks when we need them??

Source: Confounded Interest

 

Bank Of Ireland Is Now Imposing Negative Rates On Cash Held In Pensions

If you’re holding your pension with the Bank of Ireland, you are now officially being charged to do so. 

Christine Madeleine Odette Lagarde is a career, ‘stick it to the people’ French politician and lawyer serving as President of the European Central Bank since November 2019. Between July 2011 and November 2019, she served as chair and managing director of the International Monetary Fund.

In a move that we’re sure is going to have absolutely no consequences, the bank is starting to impose negative interest rates on cash held in pensions, according to The Irish Examiner. The bank is applying a rate of 0.65% on pension pots, which means customers will now pay the bank $65 on every $10,000 held. 

The bank commented: “European Central Bank interest rates have been negative since 2014. Since then banks have been subject to negative interest rates for holding funds overnight and market indications are that rates will remain low for some time.”

It continued: “As a result, we have applied negative rates on deposits for large institutional and corporate customers since 2016. We recently wrote to 14 investment and pension trustee firms to inform them about a rate change to their accounts, which is reflective of the negative interest rate environment.”

“The average amount held on deposit by investment and pension trustee firms is in excess of around €100m, therefore it is no longer sustainable for the Bank to continue with the current rate of interest. We provided 3 months’ advance notification of this rate change to our investment and pension trustee firm customers,” the bank concluded.

Ulster Bank is also considering similar rates in the future. The bank’s CEO, Jane Howard, said: “In terms of Ulster Bank, we did introduce negative rates earlier this year and we’ve introduced it for larger businesses with balances of over €1m.”

She continued: “As I sit here today we have no plans to charge negative interest rates for our personal customers but given the way everything happens, like Covid, so unexpectedly, it is not something I can rule out forever.”

By now, it feels like it is only a matter of time before the U.S. follows suit. And to think, none of this “prosperity” would be possible without the miracle of modern central banking.

Source: ZeroHedge

“Floodgates Are Open” – German Banks Start Charging Negative Rates To Retail Savers

It has been over 7 years since the European Central Bank’s key deposit facility rate was positive, and just a few weeks ago it was lowered to a record low of -50bps.

Source: Bloomberg

And during that time, European bank stocks have suffered greatly…

Source: Bloomberg

As Cornelius Riese, co-CEO of Frankfurt-based DZ Bank A.G. (Germany’s second-largest by assets), observed, negative rates indeed “have a huge impact on banks.” Riese ventured to offer some gentle criticism of Draghi & Co.’s grand policy experiment:

“Maybe at the end of the story, in three to five years, we will notice it was a historical mistake.”

Well, it appears we are about to reach the vinegar strokes of that ‘historical mistake’, as Bloomberg reports, German banks are breaking the last taboo: Charging retail clients for their savings starting with very first euro in the their accounts.

While many banks have been passing on negative rates to clients for some time, they have typically only done so for deposits of 100,000 euros ($111,000) or more. That is changing, with one small lender, Volksbank Raiffeisenbank Fuerstenfeldbruck, a regional bank close to Munich, planning to impose a rate of minus 0.5% to all savings in certain new accounts.

Another bank, Kreissparkasse Stendal, in the east of the country, has a similar policy for clients who have no other relationship with the bank; and a third, Frankfurter Volksbank, one of the country’s largest cooperative lenders, is considering going even further and charging some new customers 0.55% for all their deposits is considering an even higher charge.

“The floodgates are open,” said Friedrich Heinemann, who heads the department on Corporate Taxation and Public Finance at the ZEW economic research institute in Mannheim.

“We will soon see a chain reaction. Banks that do not follow with negative interest rates would be flooded with liquidity.”

It appears that European banks are coming around to the fact – and preparing for it – that negative rates are here to stay (especially under Lagarde who has already opined that there is nothing wrong with negative rates).

Bank CEOs across Europe have expressed their anger at the ECB’s policy over the last few months.

The ECB’s imposition of negative interest rates have created an “absurd situation” in which banks don’t want to hold deposits, rages UBS CEO Sergio Ermotti, arguing that this policy is hurting social systems and savings rates.

Oswald Gruebel, who served as Credit Suisse CEO from 2004 to 2007 and as UBS Group AG’s top executive from 2009 to 2011, has slammed ECB policy in an interview with Swiss newspaper NZZ am Sonntag.

“Negative interest rates are crazy. That means money is not worth anything anymore,” Gruebel exclaimed.

“As long as we have negative interest rates, the financial industry will continue to shrink.”

And finally, Deutsche Bank CEO Christian Sewing warned that more monetary easing by the ECB, as widely expected next week, will have “grave side effects” for a region that has already lived with negative interest rates for half a decade.

“In the long run, negative rates ruin the financial system.”

The German savings rate was around 10% in 2017, almost twice the euro-area average, but one wonders what will happen now that even mom-and-pop will have to pay to leave their spare cash in ‘safe-keeping’. Will deposit levels tumble in favor of the mattress? Or, as some have suggested, gold will get a bid as a costless way of storing wealth.

Source: ZeroHedge