Nobody has had negative interest rates without policy prescriptions that may show up as a negative rate, but on balance sheets do have costs.
1. There have been negative yields for short periods of time, but a yield isn't the same thing. Yields can go negative for technical reasons related to trading, but the if you look at rates on fresh bond offerings, they'll still be slightly positive.
2. There can be government laws that require lending, penalties and reserve requirments, etc that all change the cost to carry. So while the interest rates shows up as negative, after adding in these other items the adjusted rate is still positive. For example, German mortgages went negative a few years back, but it a requirements for some banks to original home loans to increase ownerhsip and the penalties would have larger the the rate charge, so they loaned out at -0.5% instead of taking a 1% hit (can't remember the exact numbers).
I don't know anywhere that there has actually been negative interest rates without some other sort of interventions pushing towards them.
1. There have been negative yields for short periods of time, but a yield isn't the same thing. Yields can go negative for technical reasons related to trading, but the if you look at rates on fresh bond offerings, they'll still be slightly positive.
2. There can be government laws that require lending, penalties and reserve requirments, etc that all change the cost to carry. So while the interest rates shows up as negative, after adding in these other items the adjusted rate is still positive. For example, German mortgages went negative a few years back, but it a requirements for some banks to original home loans to increase ownerhsip and the penalties would have larger the the rate charge, so they loaned out at -0.5% instead of taking a 1% hit (can't remember the exact numbers).
I don't know anywhere that there has actually been negative interest rates without some other sort of interventions pushing towards them.