This is the Tom Hartman program.

Welcome back, Tom Hart here with you on the Lyosus Professor Richard Wolff, the economist

co-founder of Democracy at Work.info, author of numerous books, his most recent The Sickness

is the system when Capitalism fails to save us from pandemics or itself, RDWOLF.com is

his other website and you can tweet him at ProfWolf, P-R-O-F-W-O-L-F-F.

And Professor Wolff, welcome back, I'm looking at this article from the Financial Times.

Bonds, this is where people give money to corporations or states in exchange for interest

on that money, but bonds worth $17 trillion now trade at a yield below zero, which means

that if I'm buying a $100,000 bond from the state of Oregon, if it's a negative yield

bond or from Ford Motor or whatever, I'm actually paying them to take my money.

I don't understand, $17 trillion worth of negative yield bond, people are big investors

or big companies or countries or, I mean, who's coming up with $17 trillion and why

are they willing to pay somebody to hang on to the money?

Well, here's the way it works.

First of all, everybody needs to understand exactly what you just said.

That a negative interest rate means that you're charging people who are lending you money.

Think of it as they're paying you a fee to store or to hold their money over a few weeks

months or years.

So it is a situation in which usually it starts with a central bank.

Banks that have more money than they can look down have the right to park that money with

the central bank in their country.

Normally, the central bank pays them, as it always did, to store that money.

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