Banks Brace

• The European Central Bank looks set to announce a range of stimulus measures Thursday, with markets waiting anxiously for details of a plan that could include both lower interest rates and fresh bond purchases.
• Unfortunately, the strategy of lowering borrowing costs for companies and households with increasingly negative interest rates is putting a serious dent in the banking industry’s profitability.
• The ECB’s current deposit rate is minus 0.4%, and that has become a charge, according to Deutsche Bank, which tallies the cost at hundreds of millions of euros this year.

(Source: Bloomberg)