I had been a customer of Smith Barney for as long as I can remember, even after it merged into Morgan Stanley in 2011.

Smith Barney was always an outstanding institution to do business with. They understood that the client always came first and went above and beyond to accommodate. This remained true when Smith Barney was under the ownership of Citibank. Smith Barney was the kind of financial partner that you wanted to have forever, and remained helpful to their customers even as their equity trading business trickled away to the online brokers in the end of the last decade and beginning of this one.

When Morgan Stanley came along in 2011, there was little reason to leave initially. The structure of the program remained as it was and the people remained the same.

In the years that followed, however, the business became about selling customers esoteric structured notes, since these instruments were really the only product that Morgan Stanley could offer that weren’t available to online brokers. Structured notes would prove to be highly profitable to Morgan Stanley with the initial sale resulting in a 3 ½ commission to the broker. But, these notes – which could be debt-based or equity-based – would almost always prove to be lousy, illiquid and a tax disaster for customers.

The tradeoff for customers became clear – if you buy structured notes, maybe Morgan Stanley would get you into that great IPO into which neither Schwab nor TD Ameritrade could provide access to.

Then, when the IPOs dried up, many customers stuck around for all of the small benefits that being a Morgan Stanley customer provided. Now, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Morgan Stanley took to stripping those away. When I, as a customer, suggested that it was an unfortunate time to be stripping benefits, my financial advisor could provide little help.

Adding still more fire to the pit, when I went to transfer my account from Morgan Stanley, they hit me with $265 in outbound account transfer fees. I surveyed my contacts at other full service brokerages who told me that these fees are not viewed as standard in the industry or appropriate. Although I have been promised a call back from Morgan Stanley with an explanation of the fees, one never came even though I had been a client for decades.

Bottom line: The COVID-19 crisis has brought out the best and the worst in people, and in companies.

The Federal Reserve has held the Fed Funds target rate constant at zero to 25 basis points today. Chair Jerome Powell indicated that the ongoing COVID-19 public health crisis has weighed heavily on the economic condition of the country. Inflation remains an overriding concern to extraordinarily low interest rates, but is very muted as a result of the economic slowdown and does not present a concern. The Federal Reserve also indicated that it remains prepared to use tremendous tools in the interim as it sees fit in order to maintain liquidity, including using its balance sheet to purchase treasury and agency mortgage-back securities. It is also employing lending powers to an unprecedented extent through a “mainstreet facility” to make credit available where such credit may be necessary to avoid or reduce household suffering (with the understanding that the Federal Reserve has lending powers but may not make grants or extend loans that it does not expect to see repaid).

The Fed’s statement indicates an intention to maintain rates here until it is confident that the economy has weathered COVID-19. The statement does not introduce the possibility of a move into a negative Fed Funds rate as was advocated last week by Narayana Kocherlochota, the former Chair of the Minneapolis Fed. Importantly, the Fed’s statement does not commit to maintaining low interest rates until unemployment returns to 2019 levels.

The Fed refrained from stating that it believes that the economy will recover nicely in 2021 after COVID-19 is behind us. Powell recognizes that there is uncertainty around the virus and that the virus is going to dictate the length and depth of this depression. We will obviously see significant declines in economic activity and significant increases in unemployment in the near term, but POwell and the Fed are unable to provide guidance for the intermediate and longer term.

There is a lot of concern that the Federal Reserve is running out of bullets in its response to the current Depression. It has already lowered the Fed Funds rates to zero, engaged in extraordinary quantitative easing, and opened up the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet in a way that makes the Federal government an active player in US debt markets.

Narayana Kocherlochota, the former Chair of the Minneapolis Fed, makes a compelling argument on Bloomberg.com today for the Federal Reserve and Chairman Jerome Powell to lower the Federal funds rate to negative territory through at least a 25 basis point cut. Kocherlochota argues that the benefits in terms of stimulating bank activity far outweighs the risks in light of the fact that the unemployment in the US continues to spiral out of control.

In a 2015 article on CNBC, Goldman Sachs’ Jan Hatzius recommended that bringing interest rates negative for any length of time must be viewed as a last resort because of the resulting impact on banks’ financials and the dislocation that such a move would cause in the US.

Of course, since the US has not experienced negative interest rates before, it is more of less entirely hypothesizing what the impact on savings and CD rates would be. Today, even with the Fed funds rate sitting at a target of zero to 0.25%, online savings rates are holding firm at or over 1.50%, with one-year online CD rates still higher. (You may be able to find higher local savings rates and local CD rates where you live by checking here or here.)

It would seem that a quarter point move in the Fed Funds rate, bringing it so decisively into negative territory, would cut out any yield in savings and virtually everything in CDs.

This action would put further pressure not just on banks, but on savers who will not be able to maintain purchasing power of safely invested assets against a continued rise in US CPI of around 1%. It would also put still further pressure on local and federal governments who depend on taxation of earned interest.

Am I wrong? Please let me know below what you think happens if the Federal Reserve takes rates negative.