The Costs and Welfare Effects of ECB's Financial Repression Policy: Consequences for German Savers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The losses in interest income of German savers as a result of ECB's monetary policy of extremely low interest rates are estimated at around €65bn pa. These losses exceed the financial costs of capital yields taxes and the inflation tax on consumer prices taken together. However, the calculations do not take into account that (especially public) debtors benefit from low interest rates. We develop new measurement concepts and apply an overlapping generation model in order to calculate stepwise the net welfare costs (excess burden) for the German economy. Capital yields taxes have an excess burden of €10bn per year. The excess burden from 1.5% inflation totals at €33bn pa. In comparison, the monetary policy of low interest rates that is conducted by the ECB since 2010 created an excess burden of €37bn or 1.4% of GDP pa. Hence, the cumulated net welfare losses resulting from the ECB policy of ultra-easy money already exceed the primary effects of the financial crisis.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".