Financial Repression Lemmings

Low and negative rates have not done a damn thing for the Eurozone, Switzerland,  Japan, or any other country that’s implemented them. Nonetheless, Fed lemmings want to Test How Banks Would Handle Negative Rates.

In its annual stress test for 2016, the Fed said it will assess the resilience of big banks to a number of possible situations, including one where the rate on the three-month U.S. Treasury bill stays below zero for a prolonged period.

Three-month bill rates have slipped slightly below zero several times in recent years, including in September after the Fed delayed rate liftoff amid global financial market turmoil, touching a low of minus 0.05 percent on Oct. 2.

New York Fed President William Dudley said last month that policy makers were “not thinking at all seriously of moving to negative interest rates.

“But I suppose if the economy were to unexpectedly weaken dramatically, and we decided that we needed to use a full array of monetary policy tools to provide stimulus, it’s something that we would contemplate as a potential action,” he said on Jan. 15.

Fed Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer said Monday that foreign central banks that had resorted to negative interest rates to stimulate their economies had been more successful than he anticipated.

“It’s working more than I can say I expected in 2012,” he told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. “Everybody is looking at how this works,” he added.

Negative Interest Rate Club

Right Over the Cliff

In the inane attempt to get consumers to spend more money and to stave off threats of consumer price deflation, central banks keep punishing the prudent as well as those on fixed incomes.