Shocking! NIRP causes savings not spending

The whole point of negative interest rates (NIRP) in Europe and Japan was to force people to spend by punishing them for clutching their cash. The rationale goes deep into the middle ages before modern economics: the economy is sluggish because people are saving too much instead of spending. Good economists thought they had buried that monster by the 1930’s, but Lord Keynes resurrected it and gave it a title of nobility. That’s how medieval economics came to dominate mainstream academics and central banks for 90 years. If you don’t believe in zombies, you haven’t followed mainstream economics for long.

How long can low rates last?

The charging of interest on loans is one of the most hated and worst understood concepts in human history. Aristotle claimed that money cannot beget money because it is dead, so charging interest on loans is immoral. Moses’ law forbid Israelis to charge interest on loans to the poor, but the Church interpreted that prohibition according to Aristotle’s economics and made charging interest on loans one of the worst sins that Christians can commit. Aristotle’s writings had almost equal weight with the Bible in many matters until Copernicus and Galileo trashed his astronomy.

But kings, nobility and popes needed to borrow money occasionally in order to keep up their conspicuous consumption, so Jews were allowed to commit the sin of usury. That gave Christians an excuse to persecute them regularly.

The church didn’t reform its economics until the 17th century when theologians from the University of Salamanca abandoned Aristotle for common sense. A letter from John Calvin to a friend on the topic may have helped. Calvin wrote that interest on loans was no different from charging rent on land, which everyone could understand.

Recently, an investing newsletter increased the confusion over interest rates for its readers. It claimed that interest rates have fallen naturally from roughly 50% in 5000 BC. “Fast-forward a bit and we see the Greeks expanded the credit system. In 600 B.C., they paid rates of around 16% in a quickly modernizing monetary system. By 100 B.C., though, a typical loan came with a rate of just 8%. And then things got interesting...”

The Damage that NIRP does

Bloomberg carried a story a few weeks ago on Denmark, which has been “blessed” with a negative interest rate policy (NIRP) longer than any other developed nation. The authors asserted that the horror stories about low interest rates with which economists have typically frightened us for decades haven’t come true in the Scandinavian country, so economics must be wrong.

Of course, the Bloomberg journalists have forgotten the primary caveat of economic reasoning – ceteris paribus, or all other things being equal. The horror of money printing, such as the disaster that nearly destroyed Germany in the early 1920s, caused hyperinflation and a plummeting exchange rate. Those haven’t afflicted Denmark, or any other major country, yet, because everything hasn’t remained ceteris or paribus.

When every nation reduces rates in concert, it has no impact on exchange rates. And it may not cause much inflation. The idea that it must cause price inflation or economics is wrong comes from a blockheaded view of the quantity theory of money. Again, ceteris paribus applies. Printing money (or technically credit expansion via low interest rates) will cause price inflation if nothing else in the economy changes. But money printing doesn’t work mechanically. Japan should know. The Bank of Japan has desperately tried to create inflation through money printing for the past 30 years.

Fed shuffles from ZIRP to NIRP

Inflation is fading; the economies of Asia, South America and Europe are collapsing; the people have tasked the central banks with fixing all things economic. Yet, reports by Fed economists show that the recent rounds of money printing through QE and low interest rates for six haven’t had the intended effect. They have certainly failed in Japan and the Big EZ (Euro Zone). What can they do to turn the world’s economies around? The answer from mainstream economists at the world’s central banks is more of the same. But if continuing to do the same thing while expecting different results is a sign of insanity?