Imperial College London (the business school’s Brevan Howard Centre), CEPR and the Swiss National Bank organized a conference on this topic in London.

Most of the speakers agreed that giving central banks the option to move interest rates much further into negative territory would be valuable; and that deposit rates lower than minus half a percent p.a. are difficult to sustain without triggering major cash withdrawals. There was less agreement on how to avoid such withdrawals. Some favored phasing out cash, as this would also render tax evasion and money laundering more difficult; others were unwilling to sacrifice the privacy benefits of cash. But many speakers emphasized that there are other possibilities to achieve the same objective. (See my earlier blog post.)