Here’s the Financial Times:

German media habitually refer to negative interest rates as penalty rates — a fine levied by the ECB to punish German savers. Tagesthemen, Germany’s top evening news programme, casually reported last week that the ECB was planning to use German taxpayers’ money to fund its asset purchase programme. Die Welt refers to the “expropriation” of the German saver — a phrase with alarming historical connotations. Even liberal newspapers, like the weekly Die Zeit, accept the view that the ECB is the cause of low interest rates.

While a number of factors have led to low eurozone interest rates, by far the most important is low rates of growth in NGDP. Eurozone NGDP growth has averaged only 1.8% over the past 11 years. Prospects going forward are not much better.

Germany is the country most responsible for this state of affairs, as it demanded that the ECB be set up as a hawkish central bank, and it has consistently lobbied for tight money policy.

And yet I don’t blame the German public for this confusion, rather the economics profession is to blame. For years, economists have been talking about easy and tight money in terms of interest rates. Is it any surprise that the German public has come to believe that low-interest rates in the eurozone represent an easy money policy by the ECB?

Going forward, this false belief about interest rates is likely to lead to a great deal of friction within the eurozone. It will also lead to bad policies. There is a danger of a feedback loop where bad policy leads to misconceptions about how things work, which leads to even worse policies. Thus the eurozone might push for a coordinated fiscal stimulus, which would likely be ineffective (as it was ineffective in Japan during the 1990s and 2000s.)

Ideas have consequences.