Last October, BofA looked at Europe’s €2.6 trillion in negative-yielding debt and discovered something “stunning”: Savings rates were going up not down.

Don’t believe us, just have a look at these three charts:

But how could that be? By all accounts – or, should we say, by all conventional Keynesian/ textbook accounts – negative rates should force people out of savings and into higher yielding vehicles or else into goods and services which “rational” actors will assume they should buy now before they get more expensive in the future as inflation rises or at least before the money they’re sitting on now yields less than it currently is.

Well inflation never rose for a variety of reasons (not the least of which was that QE and ZIRP actually contributed to the global disinflationary impulse) and nothing will incentivize savers to keep their money in the bank like the expectation of deflation.

Well, almost nothing. There’s also this (again, from BofA): “Ultra-low rates may perversely be driving a greater propensity for consumers to save as retirement income becomes more uncertain.”

Why that’s “perverse,” we’re not entirely sure. Fixed income yields nothing, and rates on savings accounts arenothing. Which means if you’re worried about your nest egg and aren’t keen on chasing the stock bubble higher or buying bonds in hopes that capital appreciation will make up for rock-bottom coupons (i.e. chasing the bond bubble), then as Gene Wilder would say, “you get nothing.” And that makes you nervous if you’re thinking about retirement. And nervous people don’t spend. Nervous people save.

Deutsche Bank has figured out this very same dynamic. In a note out Friday, the bank remarks that declining rateshave generally managed to bring consumption forward.

But, there’s a limit.

Essentially, the bank argues that NIRP may be the shocker that wakes the public up to the fact that if negative rates exert a negative (no pun intended) effect on long-term household balance sheets, they will stop spending. To wit: