The Netherlands: ING the second Netherlands bank to turn to negative savings interest

 Banking institution ING has become the second bank in the Netherlands to charge a negative interest rate on certain savings accounts. Customers will face a -0.50 percent interest rate for any amount in an account above one million euros, the bank said on Friday. The policy will affect about 6,400 current clients. The negative rate is charged per account, and not per customer.

Note Insure Digest: this is total nonsense and can not be justified in any logical way, except that it unfortunately qualifies as greed.

Read more at:
https://nltimes.nl/2020/01/31/ing-second-netherlands-bank-turn-negative-savings-interest

EU Economy: Visco Says ECB May Not Need to Add Stimulus Amid Euro - by Jana Randow Decline

The European Central Bank may not need to add stimulus measures after steps in the past three months pushed down the euro, said Governing Council member Ignazio Visco.

“Inflation expectations have to be back where they were,” Visco said Sept. 20 in an interview in Cairns, Australia, where he attended a meeting of Group of 20 finance chiefs. “This doesn’t mean that there will be a next step. We have been bold enough to reduce interest rates to a level that was unexpected to the market.”

The single currency has dropped about 6 percent since early June, when the ECB introduced a negative interest rate on excess reserves and presented a four-year lending program to fuel credit. Policy makers reduced borrowing costs further earlier this month and committed to buying asset-backed securities and covered bonds to boost the ECB’s balance sheet by as much as 1 trillion euros ($1.3 trillion).

Read more: Visco Says ECB May Not Need to Add Stimulus Amid Euro Decline - Bloomberg