It's not on their money market accounts, but regular deposits. If they didn't pay that big of an interest, they won't have been in this position now. Maybe half as bad. But, depositors did profit for this.
What you get is interest fit allowing your part of their reserve to be used for loans. It's why certificates of deposit have a higher interest rate at /r/ActualMoney banks.
Banks usually add a flat percentage fee on top of the current interest rate. Lower interest rates mean people are willing to borrow more so low interest rates are beneficial to banks.
but operating costs don't rise linearly with deposits (i imagine it rises sub-linearly, at most), esp. if they can choose to pay 0% interest for deposits.
It really is just a matter of money making. They didn't want to accept the low yield, but certain safety, and accepted a higher yield, but with risk. It caught up to them.
This is the wrong way to think about it. Rates are nearly negative, so 2% is practically 10, 100X the rates banks can earn otherwise. It's basically free money shoveled into banks, a massive boon.
Obviously the real benefit to them is calming the panic in the banking sector, which is harmful to all of them.
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