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Michael Batnik and Ben Carlson work for Ritholz Wealth Management.

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A story this week that got some play was in the negative interest rate world we're in

a bank in Denmark will pay customers to take out mortgages by

offering a negative interest rates. And this is a good headline one and everyone

jumped on it including myself but it sounds like someone actually

this on Twitter and said the people who buy the bonds will lose money but the

actual people taking out the mortgage will not make anything because they actually have to pay like

administrative fees and so they won't really but still it's it's effectively

zero right? Yes it's still very low The actual loan being given out is for the negative loan I should say is for a 10 year fixed rate mortgages and I would imagine very few people actually take those loans out.

And so yeah, the interest rate is negative.

0.5%.

For that.

So here's the one people keep asking me.

And rates in a lot of countries are now negative, especially a lot of European countries.

Who are the people buying these bonds?

Okay, so that is the issue.

Because remember a few weeks ago, we were like Greece and the US have effectively the same bar in cost we were saying

...