Negative Interest Rates - They're real, they're here, and they suck

CodyWillard

Nobody ever believed that such a crazy concept as “Negative Interest Rates” could exist in the real world, and certainly not in developed economies around the world simultaneously. But such is reality today. Negative interest rates and negative interest rate policies (“NIRP”, not to be confused with 0% interest rate policies or “ZIRP”), where a central bank charges the banks it regulates to hold their money, are now being more widely deployed. Believe it or not, countries accounting for a full quarter of global GDP now have negative interest rates, including the eurozone, Switzerland, and most recently Japan. Here in the US, we’re likely heading we’re likely to see yet another easing cycle from the US Federal Reserve, which might very well include negative interest rates (but might not -- more on that later). Why? Well, the Fed’s got a whole lot of excuses/reasons to cut its own rates and create new forms of Quantitative Easing (QE) and/or negative interest rates of its own. As I’ve been saying since late 2015, when the Fed finally raised rates from 0 to 0.25%, I don’t think we’re actually heading into a tightening cycle. And I fully expect that Janet Yellen and the Fed will get much more dovish, eventually cutting rates back to 0% and probably bringing back some form of QE and/or negative interest rates. In the weeks since I first started floating the idea that the Fed would go to negative interest rates and/or create another round of QE, the idea of us seeing negative interest rates here in the US has gone from far-fetched to quite likely. Now everybody’s trying to figure out what it means for them individually, for the stock market and for the economy writ large. This report is an attempt to explain how negative interest rates and a new easing cycle from the Federal Reserve in the context of the world’s larger currency wars will impact our world.