The Politics of Negative Interest Rates
Simone Weil once said, “If you want to know what a man is really like, take notice of how he acts when he loses money.” Likewise, if we want to know what our societies are really like, we must take notice of how they react to negative interest rates.
ATHENS – Objects of desire come at a cost. Only bad things, like toxic waste, have a negative price, the equivalent of a fee payable to anyone willing to make them disappear. Does this mean that negative interest rates embody a new perspective on money – that it has gone “bad”?