WSJ: “European Firms Borrow at Subzero Rates”
“Capitalism, almost commonsensically, cannot function well at the zero bound or with a minus sign as a yield. $11 trillion of negative yielding bonds are not assets ” they are liabilities. Factor that, Ms. Yellen into your asset price objective. You and your contemporaries have flipped $11 trillion from the left side to the right side of the global balance sheet.
In the process, you have deferred long-term pain for the benefit of short-term gain and the hopes that your ancient model renormalizes the economy over the next few years. It likely will not. Japan is the petri dish example for the past 15 years. Other developed market economies since Lehman/2009 are experiencing a similar fungus.”
–Bill Gross “Investment Outlook” (Sept, 2016).
As negative interest rates have spread in the sovereign bond market, and now jumped to corporate bonds (for at least two European companies, Sanofi and Henkel), a subtle shift in 
language seems to have crept into the vernacular.
One might even say, “fungus-like.”
So, interest rates are no longer referred to as “negative”; instead, they’re “subzero.”
I don’t know about you, but I agree with Bill Gross that this is not some trivial development — it goes to capitalism’s core.
You know, stuff like, “debits on the left, credits on the right” (the cornerstone of double-entry accounting).
Or, as a standup comic taking big pharma to task puts it (my paraphrase), “listing ‘death’ as a possible drug side effect doesn’t really fly. ‘Death’ isn’t a side effect, it’s an effect.”
Next Up: Negative (I Mean, “Subzero”) Wages?
To highlight the absurdity of negative interest rates, imagine the phenomenon spreading to the labor market — along with raw materials, the other key input in a capitalist, market-based (at least in theory) economy.
Instead of getting paid to work, then, workers would have to pay employers a nominal amount to keep their jobs (amongst other questions, one might logically ask, “with money gotten from where exactly?”).
Long before that happened, however, one might reasonably expect some sort of labor strike.
After all, why show up to work when you’re guaranteed to leave with less, 8 (or 10 or 12!) hours later.
Owners of capital (think, savers) might very well start asking themselves the same question . . .
P.S.: The last time I can remember something so bizarre happening in finance, albeit with many fewer zeroes, was when — at least briefly — Palm Corporation’s “smart phone” subsidiary fetched a market value well in excess of the parent.
Which makes no accounting sense, because by definition, the parent owns the subsidiary.
That era (circa 2000) didn’t exactly have a happy ending, either.
