Suddenly, everybody wants your cash.As recently as last year, many US and European banks were actively trying to get out of holding clients’ ready money because they were awash with deposits.
The trend was quite extreme in Europe where central bank rates had been negative for years. UBS and Credit Suisse, among others, were charging their wealth management customers as much as 0.6 per cent simply for the privilege of having a large balance in their accounts. But US banks too kept cutting the interest rates they paid on corporate deposits in the hope of getting customers to go elsewhere.
Money market funds and institutional cash management products, meanwhile, were paying next-to-nothing returns, and global asset managers were still having to subsidise them to keep the business going.