I am always on the lookout for cheap cash.

I usually earn 50%-100% a year in my personal trading account, when I have time to devote to it.

Taking on new developers, writers, and customer support staff requires cash. It also sometimes requires a few bucks to pry valuable information out of my global contacts for your trading benefit.

So I had a principal repayment of $325,000 due the other day on one of my lines of credit.

Then I got the call I thought I’d never get.

My lender didn’t want their money back.

It turns out that their loan to me was the top-performing asset in their portfolio last year, earning 4%. Better yet, she was able to sleep at night, and ignore the market volatility.

If I paid her back now her only choice was to put it into cash paying a mere 25 basis points. Ten year Treasury bonds (TLT) only yielded 1.60%. Anything else out there, stocks, junk bonds, foreign currencies, or precious metals were just too scary right now.

I thought for a moment.

My predatory inner hedge fund trader told me to demand a 2% interest rate only, and she had to say ‘please.” But she had provided money when I needed it and had been a good counterparty.

Like everyone and his brother, his fraternity mate, and his long lost cousin, I thought bonds would fall this year and interest rates would rise. So far, they have moved in the other direction in the extreme.

The handful of colleagues I know with a half century of trading and investing experience never thought they’d see a 1.60% print on the ten year.

Yet, here we are.

There is now a global negative interest rate panic going on. Investors fear that banks will never make money again, and are throwing their shares out the window with both hands.

However, just like the stock market is discounting a recession that isn’t going to happen, banks are now discounting a financial crisis that isn’t going to happen either.

Higher rates are normally what you get in the seventh year of an economic recovery. This is usually when corporate America starts to expand capacity and borrow money with both hands, driving rates up.