As the WSJ wryly put it this morning, "Officials at the European Central Bank surely celebrated Tuesday's survey showing the last barrage of asset purchases and negative rates had a positive effect on bank lending to households and businesses."
Alas, as the WSJ also adds, "policy makers may want to hold off uncorking the champagne just yet. In fact, most banks answering the survey said the ECB's policies had no impact at all."
Back on April 9 we described the latest example of how criminal Wall Street behavior leads to zero prison time and just more slaps on the wrist, when Warren Buffett's favorite bank, Wells Fargo, admitted to "deceiving" the U.S. government into insuring thousands of risky mortgages. According to the settlement, Wells Fargo "admits, acknowledges, and accepts responsibility" for having from 2001 to 2008 falsely certified that many of its home loans qualified for Federal Housing Administration insurance.
In early 2015, after seeing a staggering $1.4 trillion in Euro area government debt trade at negative interest rates (the number has since grown to $6 trillion) we wondered when the bailout of insolvent governments was going to make its way to other debtors. Our question was quickly answered when we found that a negative rate mortgage had been issued by Nordea Credit, a bank in Denmark. Recently, even the WSJ finally stumbled on this bizarre inversion of traditional borrower obligations.
Now that not only Mario Draghi but also Ben Bernanke have joined in the loud and growing chorus of "economic experts" debating the arrival of the monetary paradrop and suggesting that that helicopter money "may be the best available alternative", it is just a matter of time before helicopter money is actually implemented, "maybe not today, but in the next recession" according to Deutsche Bank.
And it is the same Deutsche Bank that provides a handy primer how to trade (or frontrun as the case may be) this now inevitable and terminal monetary policy.