NIRP Arrives In The US: TBTF Banks Tell Customers To Move Their Cash Or Be Charged Fees

Back in June, the world was speechless when Goldman’s head of the ECB, Mario Draghi, stunned the world when he took Bernanke’s ZIRP and raised him one better by announcing the ECB would send deposit rates into negative territory, in the process launching the Neutron bomb known as N(egative)IRP and pushing European monetary policy into the “twilight zone”, forcing savers to pay (!) for the privilege of keeping the product of their labor in the form of fiat currency instead of invested in a global ponzi scheme built on capital market so broken even the BIS can no longer contain its shocked amazement.
Well, the US economy may be “decoupling” (just as it did right before Lehman) and one pundit after another are once again (incorrectly) predicting that the Fed may raise rates, but when it comes to the true “value” of money, US banks have just shown that when it comes to spread between reality and the economic outlook, the schism has never been deeper.
Enter US NIRP.
As the WSJ reports, far from paying for the privilege of holding other people’s cash (and why would they with nearly $3 trillion in positive carry excess reserves sloshing around) US banks – primarily of the TBTF variety – “are urging some of their largest customers in the U. S. to take their cash elsewhere or be slapped with fees, citing new regulations that make it onerous for them to hold certain deposits.”
The banks, including J. P. Morgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc., HSBC Holdings PLC, Deutsche Bank AG and Bank of America Corp. , have spoken privately with clients in recent months to tell them that the new regulations are making some deposits less profitable, according to people familiar with the conversations.

This post was published at Zero Hedge on 12/08/2014.