It doesn't cost any more to store bits or paper in Europe now than it did when interest rates were positive. The "storage costs" metaphor as a justification for negative interest rates is a whopping falsehood.
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Why wouldn’t you just hold cash instead of a negative yielding bond?
Now here is where storage costs *do* come in. To go deeper or longer with negative interest rates, they must resort to ever more extreme laws to make storing paper money more expensive, by banning cash storage services, charging fees for businesses to deposit cash, etc.
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Ultimately, they must try to ban gold and cryptocurrency, or at least place a substantial gross proceeds tax (i.e. not just capital gains tax) on conversion between these and their increasingly regulated and restricted fiat.
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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They could just abolish cash (suggested some years ago by Willem Buiter at Citi). Rogoff at Harvard is a proponent of abolishing high-denomination bills.
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"Just" abolish physical bearer money, the the main form of money for millennia until recent decades, leaving us only with digital accounts centralized under banker control. Spendable crypto or gold would also foil their ability to extract haircuts, excuse me "negative interest".
End of conversation
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