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Negative in sentence

2738 examples of Negative in a sentence

The US is not the only country with very low or negative real long-term interest rates.
For, excluding oil, Africa has a negative trade balance with China.
Traditionalists also argue that meritocracy implies individualism, and that too much individualism and too little social solidarity and responsibility are negative features of western society.
Unlike other Russian leaders, Gorbachev accepts responsibility for the negative consequences of his rule.
Their export markets in emerging economies will suffer, damping hopes of a trade-led recovery, but that negative effect stands to be more than offset by the windfall from a big drop in energy costs.
Investors are talking of “green shoots” of recovery and of positive “second derivatives of economic activity” (continuing economic contraction is the first, negative, derivative, but the slower rate suggests that the bottom is near).
Because they function as insurance on borrowers’ ability to meet their obligations, they make it easier to express a negative opinion on a company or a security.
To express a negative view via the CDS market, investors do not need to locate securities to borrow (a prerequisite to shorting), and they risk only a limited premium, while they have the opportunity to gain many times that.
It was the CDS market that allowed the negative – and correct – view of the housing market held by John Paulson and others finally to be embedded into market prices.
As the main source of negative information that is not sensitive to power, the CDS market is feared, and politicians want to eliminate it.
The Negative Way to Growth?
But now we have come to the most unconventional policy tool of them all: negative nominal interest rates.
And it is not just short-term policy rates that are now negative in nominal terms: about $3 trillion of assets in Europe and Japan, at maturities as long as ten years (in the case of Swiss government bonds), now have negative interest rates.
At first blush, this seems absurd: Why would anyone want to lend money for a negative nominal return when they could simply hold on to the cash and at least not lose in nominal terms?
In fact, investors have long accepted real (inflation-adjusted) negative returns.
When you hold a checking or current account in your bank at a zero interest rate – as most people do in advanced economies – the real return is negative (the nominal zero return minus inflation): a year from now, your cash balances buy you less goods than they do today.
And if you consider the fees that many banks impose on these accounts, the effective nominal return was already negative even before central banks went for negative nominal rates.
In other words, negative nominal rates merely make your return more negative than it already was.
Investors accept negative returns for the convenience of holding cash balances, so, in a sense, there is nothing new about negative nominal interest rates.
Moreover, if deflation were to become entrenched in the eurozone and other parts of the world, a negative nominal return could be associated with a positive real return.
One still might think that it makes sense to hold cash directly, rather than holding an asset with a negative return.
So, if you include the costs of holding cash safely – and include the benefits of check writing – it makes sense to accept a negative return.
Beyond retail savers, banks that are holding cash in excess of required reserves have no choice but to accept the negative interest rates that central banks impose; indeed, they could not hold, manage, and transfer those excess reserves if they were held as cash, rather than in a negative-yielding account with the central bank.
Of course, this is true only so long as the nominal interest rate is not too negative; otherwise, switching to cash – despite the storage and safety costs – starts to make more sense.
But why would investors accept a negative nominal return for three, five, or even ten years?
If you were holding Swiss franc assets at a negative nominal return right before its central bank abandoned its euro peg in mid-January, you could have made a 20% return overnight; a negative nominal return is a small price to pay for a large capital gain.
And yet negative bonds yields are also occurring in countries and regions where the currency is depreciating and likely to depreciate further, including Germany, other parts of the eurozone core, and Japan.
Of course, negative returns make their balance sheets shakier: a defined-benefit pension plan needs positive returns to break even, and when most of its assets yield a negative nominal return, such results become increasingly difficult to achieve.
Even if their nominal returns are negative, they must defer to safety.
Over time, of course, negative nominal and real returns may lead savers to save less and spend more.
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