What's Chair Powell said about negative rates...>

FED: What's Chair Powell said about negative rates already this year? (1/2) 

- Feb 2020, Congressional Testimony: "A number of countries around the world, as

you know, face the problem of what do you do when your policy rate gets to zero

and some of them actually went below zero. The United States chose not to. We

chose not to at the Fed. We used other tools when we got to the lower bound and

those were forward guidance and large scale asset purchases. I think going

forward our inclination would be to rely on the tools that we did use as opposed

to negative rates. That's our instinct is, that in the US context, that's not a

tool we're looking at. The question about intermediation is when you have

negative rates, does it wind up creating downward pressure on bank

profitability, which limits credit expansion? There's some evidence of that, so

in any case, we are watching other institutions around the world who've done

that and we'll be able to see what the results are."