by Paul Kasriel
Financial Sense
A new acronym has entered the lexicon of central banking in recent months – NIRP, which stands for negative interest rate policy. If ZIRP, zero interest rate policy, won’t stimulate faster growth in nominal spending and faster growth in the prices of goods and services, then perhaps central bank-engineered negative short-term interest rates will do the trick. In June 2014, the European Central Bank (ECB) introduced NIRP and the central banks of Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, and Japan have recently done so as well. For the most part, NIRP involves a central bank paying a negative rate of interest on a portion of reserves or deposits held by private depository institutions (mainly commercial banks) by the central banks. One purpose of NIRP is to encourage banks to make more loans by penalizing them with a negative nominal return on “excess” reserves held by the central bank. Another purpose of NIRP is to achieve a lower structure of real (inflation-expectations adjusted) interest rates. After all, if the yields on short-maturity interest rates are at zero and investors expect deflation, then the real yields on these securities would be positive. (The real yield is the nominal yield minus inflation expectations.