The European Central Bank (ECB) is considering using negative interest rates, a tool that erodes the value of your money, as it introduces the digital euro — its central bank digital currency (CBDC).
This is according to Sarah Palurovic, the executive director of the Digital Euro Association (DEA) think tank.
During an appearance on the Poundcast podcast, Palurovic said that the ECB wants to “keep the possibility open for tiered remuneration” after it introduces the digital euro because the ECB wants to have “measures that incentivize or disincentivize people to hold more or less CBDCs.” She added that one of the measures the ECB is considering is negative interest rates.
Negative interest rates allow bureaucrats at central banks to choose a rate at which your money expires and punish those who save their money. For example, if they set a negative interest rate of -10%, you lose 10% of your money each year unless you spend it.
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The potential scope of these negative interest rate proposals is vast. The euro has around 341 million daily users and is the official currency of 20 Western countries.
Governments and global institutions such as the World Bank are big fans of expiring money because they see it as a “monetary policy tool” that can “make money costly to hold and would thus pressure people to spend it quickly.”
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And negative interest rates are just one of the ways the World Bank and central banks around the world hope to control how people spend by programming their money. The ECB has previously proposed having spending limits on the digital euro, the Bank of England (BOE) wants the power to decide what people spend their CBDCs on, and the World Bank wants to be able to “ban certain users from access to cash.”
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