My two cents since Janet yellen is on T.V. Here
Negative rates reflect the particular appetite of economic actors for safe assets such as sovereign bonds. As the demand for these bonds increases, the fixed yield of these bonds diminishes to the point of entering the negative zones. This does not discourage investors who continue to prefer these assets to other riskier ones. Banks are obliged to buy them in order to have collateral available. Speculators in the money markets buy them because they hope to gain by selling them at more expensive prices once the rates continue to fall. Insurance companies have an obligation to hold them.
This is however not the purpose of central banks which throughout the world are struggling to find ways of becoming more resourceful to push banks to lend and businesses to invest by borrowing. Through what is now commonly called quantitative easing, their advertisements of working effectively are increasingly hailed as 'successful' yet we only see promises of shortening its duration.
How do we explain this situation? By virtue of the lack of appetite for risk-taking on the markets and, consequently, the low demand for corporate debt. Why are companies so unprofitable? :
- The profit prospects in our economies are very low due to too many institutional rigidities.
- Secondly and most importantly, it must be remembered that the 2008 crisis greatly devalued the assets of companies that have huge debts to repay. Therefore, conscious of the weight of it, they want to reduce their risk-taking and reduce their debt. Broadly speaking, companies prefer to reduce their debt indefinitely rather than take new risks by using credit. They prefer to clean up their balance sheets and invest again only when they have sufficient equity or when the valuation of their assets is sufficiently robust to guarantee additional indebtedness. Since 2008, many companies have discovered that they do not meet either of these conditions. The weakness of credit signals a weak demand, resulting from companies' reluctance to invest in the current environment.
- Thus, the eurozone is globally in a phase of deleveraging under the weight of countries like Germany, Portugal, Spain, Hungary. The United Kingdom may be said to be in a hoarding phase, the United States is very close to net deleveraging and Japan is now deleveraging For 25 years.
In a classic crisis, debt falls rapidly under bankruptcy and there is rapid restructuring of assets as businesses and individuals boost the economy. In the japanese situation, companies reduce their debts only very slowly and restructure their assets only as they are able to meet their obligations. In this type of crisis, companies are making surpluses (unlike what they do in a normal context), personal surpluses are diminishing and states take over businesses and generate more and more deficits. The goal: keep the economy afloat. Meanwhile, the economy is stagnating. This is EXACTLY what happened in Japan after the crisis in the late 1980s.
Conclusion
One must understand the situation in which one is in if not to change it to adapt to it. We need to take stock of the risks that these unconventional monetary policies pose to us:
- It will be very difficult to get out of a policy of extremely low or even negative rates;
- The flattening / deformation of the yield curve makes the investment risk for companies unreadable;
- Addiction to public debt puts the problem into the future with companies that increasingly rely on public support and move away from serving consumers in a sound economic calculation;
- The low rates make it very fragile industries specialized in protection against the vagaries of life, especially insurers.
- It is the Japaneseization of our economies.