negative film movie reel Film. Wikimedia Commons

Remember back in December when we highlighted that one of the responses to central banks' introduction of negative interest rates might actually be a raising of interest rates by banks to borrowers?

The bank's preferred solution then might be to keep income up by widening the spread between deposit rates and borrowing rates by increasing the interest rate charged to borrowers. And thus dropping into negative interest rates on deposits can lead to a rise in interest rates for borrowers.

Well, that apparently is happening in Switzerland, whose central bank has had negative interest rates for over a year.

In response, it seems, Swiss banks have pushed up the cost of mortgages, particularly long-dated ones, with spreads more than doubling on average, according to Brupbacker and Nemes. At the same time, the lower bound on retail deposits has been maintained, for the obvious reason of not wanting to incentivize customers to turn up at branches and demand their cash.

It seems that borrowers are trying to lock in lower interest rates by taking out longer-term loans, causing banks to raise the interest rates on those loans so as to maintain or widen the spread between rates charged to borrowers and offered to depositors.

Longer-term loans, of course, brings up other problems with maturity mismatching (loans that are ultra-long-term, backed by deposits that can be withdrawn immediately), but that's a problem inherent to loan banking anyway. For now, the move to negative interest rates appears to be spurring borrowing (or maybe just refinancing) but at a higher cost than central banks would have predicted.

