By Kei-Ichiro Inaba and Lukasz Rawdanowicz, Macroeconomic Policy Division, OECD Economics Department
The ECB, the Bank of Japan and five other central banks in Europe have applied negative interest rates on commercial banks’ reserves. This additional monetary policy stimulus, following large asset purchases by central banks in some of these areas, should boost the economy and thus raise inflation closer to target. However, its effectiveness may be reduced if negative interest rates undercut banks’ profits. As discussed in Box 1.2 in the latest Economic Outlook, so far these negative effects have been small but will increase in the euro area.
Negative interest rates applied to central bank reserves should lower short and longer-term market interest rates by signalling an easier monetary policy stance and encouraging banks and investors to rebalance their portfolios towards riskier assets. With unchanged monetary policy abroad, they should also weaken the domestic currency. All these effects should bolster the economy and thus banks.
However, negative interest rates may also imply direct losses for banks. The feasibility for banks to compensate these losses depends on their business models. It can be high when banks liabilities are largely in the form of inter-bank loans or bonds and stimulative monetary policy is effective in lowering market interest rates. In contrast, the feasibility will be particularly limited for banks with a large share of retail deposits. Passing negative interest rates to depositors risks widespread withdrawals when storing cash is not very costly. Thus, banks could be forced to compensate losses by raising fees and increasing, or not lowering, interest rates on loans. The chance of such an outcome, and an associated perverse impact on loan demand and growth, increases with the level and duration of negative interest rates.
So far, interest costs on banks’ funds at central banks have been limited and tiny compared to banks’ profits and the average interest rates on funds placed with the central banks are less negative than the central banks’ deposit rates (table below). This stems from various forms of exemptions (tiered reserve systems in Denmark, Japan, Norway and Switzerland; exemption for required reserves in the euro area and Japan). In Sweden, the costs are reduced as banks effectively do not use the deposit facility given that they can purchase Riksbank’s certificates or use overnight fine-tuning operations that are remunerated at less negative interest rates than the deposit rate. In Japan, banks as a whole continue to earn net positive interest income from excess reserves.
In the euro area, the cost of negative interest rates for banks is going to increase with the expansion of ECB total assets and the concomitant increase in reserves for banking sector as a whole. This will not be the case for Japan. Although the Bank of Japan intends to sustain asset purchases, the negative-interest tier has been capped at around 30 trillion yen.
References
OECD (2016), OECD Economic Outlook, Volume 2016, Issue 1, OECD Publishing, Paris.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/eco_outlook-v2016-1-en