To add one more angle on it: everyone can't save money at the same time. Say you have 100B euros. The next year everyone can't just have 110B euros in total u

To add one more angle on it: everyone can't save money at the same time. Say you have 100B euros. The next year everyone can't just have 110B euros in total unless you print money. What really happens is that 'savings' have two sides to them, and the other side is debt. So when people's savings go up by 10B, 10B of debt is created somewhere else (bank loans, government borrowing, etc) that enables that. Having things work this way makes some intuitive sense. Savings are really a promise for goods & services in the future, so it makes sense that you have a matching promise to (forgo) goods & services in the future to counterbalance that. In Germany's case, it's possible for the public and government to both save in aggregate only as long as trading partners go into debt (in euros). But if the debt becomes unsustainable, you will lose your savings that are the other side of that debt. Now, everyone can try to save at the same time, but because it's impossible it doesn't work and you just go into a recession. That is, everyone stops spending, people lose their job, and even though they want to save they can't, so the impossibility is avoided. Even though the basics aren't extremely complicated, it doesn't work like a household, and in many countries the average level of economics education seems to be about zero. There's a lot of public sentiment that everyone should should just save up and pay down debt, even though it doesn't make much mathematical sense how that could happen. I think there's a good chance people are elected at some point that handle things very badly. On an single individual level there's no reason to avoid saving, it's a good idea. But someone has to take on the debt on the other side of that saving. If no one wants to (including the government), it seems reasonable for interest rates to trend negative.