Interest rates have been negative in Europe for years. But it took the flood of savings unleashed in the pandemic for banks finally to charge depositors in earnest.
Germany’s biggest lenders have told new customers since last year to pay a 0.5% annual rate to keep large sums of money with them. That is creating an unusual incentive, where banks that usually want deposits as an inexpensive form of financing, are essentially telling customers to go away.
The pandemic has changed the equation. Savings rates skyrocketed with consumers at home. And huge relief programs from the ECB have flooded banks with excess deposits. Banks also have used the economic dislocation of the pandemic to make operational changes they have long resisted.
According to price-comparison portal Verivox, 237 banks in Germany currently charge negative interest rates to private customers, up from 57 before the pandemic hit in March of last year. Charges range between 0.4% and 0.6% for deposits beginning anywhere from €25,000 to €100,000.
The ECB’s deposit rate, which it charges banks, is minus 0.5%. The central bank has signaled it is unlikely to change that level anytime soon.
Banks in Germany are particularly hit by negative rates because Germans are big savers. About 30% of all household deposits in the eurozone are in Germany, according to the ECB. Last year, deposits in the country rose 6% to a record €2.55 trillion as people became wary of spending under the pandemic or simply had nowhere to spend, with restaurants closed and travel restricted.
In Denmark, where interest rates were cut to below zero two years before the eurozone, banks have gone from charging wealthier clients to smaller ones over the past year. The Danish central bank estimates about a quarter of the country’s depositors are currently being affected.
Nordea Bank Abp recently lowered the deposit threshold for a 0.75% charge to 250,000 danish krone, equivalent to $41,000, from 750,000 danish krone as the pandemic will likely prolong the era of negative rates.
The flip side for customers there, is that in some cases, while they pay to deposit money, they don’t have to pay anything to borrow. Nordea in January started offering 20-year mortgages at 0%.

After joining the lottery through the social media app WeChat, Ms. Huang, 28, a business strategist in Shenzhen, received a digital envelope with 200 electronic Chinese yuan, or eCNY, worth around $30. To spend it, she went to a convenience store near her office and picked out some nuts and yogurt. Then she pulled up a QR code for the digital currency from inside her bank app, which the store scanned for payment.
“The journey of how you pay, it’s very similar” to that of other Chinese payments apps, Ms. Huang said of the eCNY experience, though she added that it wasn’t quite as smooth.
China has charged ahead with a bold effort to remake the way that government-backed money works, rolling out its own digital currency with different qualities than cash or digital deposits.
Digital currencies created by central banks give governments more of a financial grip. These currencies can enable direct handouts of money that expire if not used by a particular date and can make it easier for governments to track financial transactions to stamp out tax evasion and crack down on dissidents.
The design of eCNY borrows only a few minor technical elements from Bitcoin and does not use the so-called blockchain technology, a ledger-like system

@WABAC, you may want to review River Park Short Term High Yield, RPHYX. David has provided a detail analysis of the fund.
https://mutualfundobserver.com/2017/05/riverpark-short-term-high-yield-fund-rphyxrphix/
YTD return is +0.3% while vast majority of bond funds are in red for the year.

“Bonds are not the place to be these days,” Buffett said. “Fixed-income investors worldwide – whether pension funds, insurance companies or retirees – face a bleak future.”
Buffett noted that the benchmark 10-year Treasury yield had fallen drastically to 0.93% at the end of 2020 from 15.8% in September 1981. Meanwhile, investors earn a negative return on trillions of dollars of sovereign debt in Germany and Japan, he added.

@stillers

I have been DCA'ing into TMSRX. FWIW, it has easily been outperforming those three AA funds since its inception with only ~28% stocks.

So was IQDAX vs other alternative multi-strategies.

Feb 26th Episode:

Free Issues (Grant's Interest Rate Observer):
https://grantspub.com/subscribe/index.cfm#freeBlock

“Whoa. A lot to unpack there” - Not really. It’s just one of a half-dozen different market takes Barron’s typically presents from a variety of different sources in a small section of the magazine each week. More, I think, to give a flavor of the kinds of questions advisors are batting around (to borrow your spring training metaphor) than to provide any definitive or accurate point of view.
“But I hear the GOP wants to position itself ... ” - OK