Either by tolerating some risk and investing locally or by buying some US Treasury bonds.
And if people want to tell me I should rather spend some money to push the economy... seriously? I don't need a new tv/phone/car/whatever every few years..
They tell you in the news to save the environment by doing "xyz" daily but just restrain on buying shit you don't need?? No that's too easy..
And in the process of everyone spending money to buy stuff they don't need, we're destroying the world we live in.
I can't find the article, but it was about extracting X(forgot which) material. And if you want just 1% yearly growth.
If I recall correctly once you outgrow a planet, its less than 250 years before you outgrow whole of our galaxy, and less than 500 before whole known universe.
Just give it away and collect that sweet immaterial feeling of a job well done. Support causes you believe in.
There was a good article in the Telegraph the other day by someone who used to work for the EU Commission on monetary policy back in the 90s, until he was fired for writing a book arguing that the ERM was terrible :) It argued that central banks are putting the world on a conveyer belt to communism.
The argument ran like this. Because they believe their mandate is to create spending ("growth") at any cost, any form of savings - even low risk investments - is an enemy to their goal and must be suppressed. So they print money to buy up all the low risk investments, to force investors into higher risk investments. That creates bigger bubbles and to try and push back or shrink the resulting recessions they must keep pushing spending levels ever higher, so they buy more and more assets people are using to try and store value. The terminal state is one in which central banks own most of the economy, which is communism.
And if they had been, that would not exactly been a bad thing, given how much shortage there was of basic consumer goods in communist countries.
I think it seems considerably more absurd in modern rich western countries today, that we are still pushing for ever high consumption.
For all its flaws, the communist countries at least seem to focus more on items being more easy to reuse and repair. Western society is getting deeper and deeper into really short product cycles with products which are next to impossible to repair. We are essentially pushed to an artificially high consumption level.
This has the effect of pulling the cash in banks into the ECB and thus out of investments. Cash that is not invested, but stored in the ECB is not contributing to the economy. Moreover, it is essentially unfair competition by the ECB. Finally, governments might be miffed that investors don't buy government bonds.
There is another justification that is essentially focusing entirely on the "Cash that is not invested, but stored in the ECB is not contributing to the economy." line of reasoning. Here, the idea is simply to reduce the ECB interest so banks will want to invest more, thus growing the economy. This differs from the first argument because it doesn't care about the 'risk free interest rate' of the current market. It just wants more money in the economy.