After Denmark, Now Belgium Is Paying People To Take Out A Mortgage – OpEd

We didn’t have to wait long before Denmark’s Nordea Credit unleashed this idiocy. And now two banks in Belgium have followed suit, paying instead of charging interest on mortgages to a handful of customers.

Thanks to Mario Draghi’s generosity with “other generations’ slavery”, the negative rate mortgage is now a reality. As Het Nieuwsblad reports (via Google Translate),

Getting paid to borrow money for your house. It seems too good to be true, but for some clients of BNP Paribas and ING is not a dream but reality. The interest rate on their home loan is dropped below zero and so they get money from the bank.

For those who in 2012 closed a mortgage loan with a variable rate at BNP Paribas Fortis or ING are now very lucky. Due to a decline in interest rates, the interest rate on their home loan has also fallen below zero. In other words, the banks pay their customers rather than collect interest, reports De Tijd.

With a loan with fixed interest rate you pay a fixed rate for the duration of your loan. But at a variable interest rate, the interest rate can change at any time, depending on the conditions on capital markets. The rate is now so low that it went below zero interest rates for some customers.

The European Central Bank (ECB) lowered its deposit rate below zero, after all, and also buys bonds en masse to push market interest rates down.

Careful not cause a stampede of desperate “Belgian Dream” homebuyers (we hear apartments are cheap in Molenbeek), the banks note that it’s ‘limited’ to some clients…

It’s okay but for a limited number of customers. BNP Paribas Fortis is about “a few dozen customers” and ING also speaks of a “very limited number of contracts.” Other banks do not have a customer with a negative interest rate.

And just like that, as we warned in January, what started in Denmark has spread to Belgium, and soon everywhere else in Europe, a situation has now emerged where savers who pay the bank to hold their cash courtesy of negative deposit rates, are directly funding the negative interest rate paid to those who wish to take out debt. In fact, the more debt the greater the saver-subsidized windfall.

That all this will end in blood and a lot of tears is clear to anyone but the most tenured economists, however in the meantime, we can’t wait to take advantage of the humorous opportunities that Europe (and soon Japan and the US) will provide in the coming months, as spending profligacy will be directly subsidized and funded by the insolvent monetary system, while responsible behavior and well-paid labor will be punished, first with negative rates and soon thereafter: with threats, both theoretical and practical, of bodily harm.