The German View: A 'Count Dracula' has sucked the life out of German savers.

• Author: Engelen, K.

With the changeover at the top from Mario Draghi to Christine Lagarde, German anger at the ECB's negative interest rates will not go away. In the spring of 2016, then-German Minister of Finance Wolfgang Schauble spoke to a high-level meeting in Kronberg and said he had told Draghi he could be "proud" to be responsible for half the election success of the Alternative fur Deutschland, thanks to his monetary policy decisions.

At that time, the far-right AfD had reached 14.2 percent in the Berlin state election. Now it's the largest opposition party in the Bundestag, reaching up to 20 percent of disgruntled voters in the eastern parts of Germany. Three years on, the smoldering revolt of the German middle class and the financial sector against Strafzinsen--"penalty rates"--is considered, along with Chancellor Merkel's opening the borders for more than a million refugees, a main factor in an erosion of the voter base for Germany's major political parties.

The German revolt against the ECB exploded on September 12, 2019, when the ECB Governing Council further lowered interest rates and restarted its purchases of government and corporate bonds at a monthly pace of [euro]20 billion, beginning November 1, 2019.

The German tabloid Bild presented Draghi as "Count Dracula" who "sucks our accounts empty." German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz warned bankers against passing costs along to their customers. Bavarian Governor Markus Soder called for a ban on banks passing on negative interest rates on deposits of less than [euro]100,000.

Hans-Walter Peters, president of the Association of German Banks, points out that at [euro]2.3 billion, the annual bill for German banks from negative interest rates in 2018 was equivalent to nearly 10 percent of banks' annual pretax profit. The banking industry complains that euro area banks pay more than [euro]7 billion a year to deposit funds overnight with their central bank while at the same time their income from lending is eroded. In a major analysis, Handelsblatt came out with an alarming warning that negative interest rates would eat into...