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Comment by ketzu | Hacker News Reader

They nicely provide an anchor point for reference on how much money is held in accounts:

> 9.45 trillion euros held in current, or checking, accounts at banks across the euro zone.

Deutsche Bank, one of the examples, reported higher reductions in deposits, offers 0.4% interest with no daily access. [1, 19th of April]

One of the popular directs banks (DKB) offers 1% [2]

A popular free trading platform (trade republic) offers 2% for uninvested money [3]

So I wonder what the overall change in deposits actually is compared to those 9.45 trillion euros, it doesn't seem that surprising when the big examples in the articles have the lowest interest. Are people also leaving the higher interest banks?

[1] https://www.boerse-online.de/nachrichten/geldundvorsorge/pos...

[2] https://bank.dkb.de/privatkunden/sparen/tagesgeldkonto

[3] https://traderepublic.com/de-de/zinsen

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There are no high interest banks. 2% in EU is very high interest.

Sorry, I don't understand what you mean by that. Could you explain?

The 1% and 2% examples are not from the article as one of the losing deposit examples, just my comparisons because I am familiar with them. So I wonder if they also report reduced deposits. (I am probably not even using the correct financial instrument to compare, it's just one easy to look up.)

So I wondered if consumers using the low interest banks (like Deutsche Bank with 0.4%) are mostly just switching to higher interest banks (like DKB with 1.0%) and the actual change to those 9.45 trillion euros is not in the tens of billions, as suggested by the article (e.g. Deutsche Bank with nearly 5% in change in deposits), but instead is closer to a few billions. In context of 9.45 trillion, that would be ~0.1%, which does not sound too worrying.

If I lock my money with the bank for 3 months, I can get 3.5%. Otherwise it's currently 2.6%.

(those are vanilla rates offered to everyone, btw, nothing special)

1. Euro?

2. Which bank, which country?

That's true for EUR countries but another commenter claims 6% in a non eurozone EU country.

For weaker and riskier currencies.

I can get 7% bonds for RON...

The EU is a single market, with free movement of capital. This means the risk-free rate ought to be the same EU-wise regardless of currency. If interest rates are significantly higher in a particular EU country compared to the rest, it probably means the markets have determined that that particular interest rate isn't risk-free.

These are retail bank savings rates. Risk free except if the bank collapses, and in some countries customer deposits are backed by state guarantee to some upper limit.

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