<Anchor>

friendly economic reporter is listed. Today (18th), let's talk about bank deposits. They say they have nowhere to leave their money. The bank had deposits in the 5% range at the end of last year, but now you can't find them?

<Reporter>

Until November or so last year, deposits paying more than 5% interest were about 30% of all term deposits.

It was the first time in 20 years that I had been able to earn this amount of interest on a bank deposit.

That was when Korea's benchmark interest rate, set by the Monetary Affairs Committee of the Bank of Korea, rose to just 3% and 3.25% at the end of the month.

Since then, the benchmark interest rate has risen and is now up to 3.5%, let alone 5% interest on the market.

You can't even find a deposit in the 4% range.

Most of the one-year bank term deposits on the market do not pay interest at the base rate.

Through the Association of Banks, you can compare the interest rates of 19 banks nationwide, including Internet banks.

Of the 41 one-year term deposit products of the 19 banks currently disclosed, 28 offer interest below the base rate, or 68%.

There are also 8 products in the 2% range or less. There were only five products that paid more interest than the base rate.

That's the basic interest rate. Usually, you get a little bit of a prime rate, such as a salary passbook preferential treatment.

But even if you managed to pull all the prime rates you could get and get the best interest rates with these products, there was only one product that offered 4% interest.

The rest are usually in the 3% range. Even if you pull all the prime rates, there are 19 out of 41 products that don't pay interest even as much as the current base rate of 3.5%.

<Anchor>
I usually know that a little higher level in
the base rate is the market rate, so why are bank interest rates so low these days?

<The
biggest reason >
is that most people think that this is not the end of raising interest rates, that there is only one thing left to do.

And when we take money to the banks, we don't see much of an atmosphere in which the banks compete for interest to attract that money.

[Cho Young-moo/Research Fellow, LG Management Research Institute: Due to the sluggish real estate market, there is not much demand for households to borrow money. On the other hand, concerns about financial instability and concerns about a recession seem to have had an impact.]

If there are many people who want to borrow money, the bank will also try to accumulate a lot of money in the market.

But the demand for loans itself is lower than before, and lending regulations are still alive.

From the bank's point of view, if you pay a lot of interest, that is, you spend a lot of money to pull in deposits, you have less place to roll that money.

And even though they're paying less and less interest, there's this atmosphere because they don't have anywhere else to put their money, "I can't do it, but the bank is the most reassuring."

So now that the expectation is that overall interest rates will go down, even if it's not for banks, it's not going to be a big expense to pull deposits.

<Anchor>

Lending rates have come down a lot, but not as much as deposit rates, right? What do you see as the future?

<Reporter>

The difference between the average interest rate between deposits and loans on the market is about 1.78 percentage points. As of last February.

That's 0.15 percentage points wider than in January.

Regarding the difference in the reserve rate for March, the tally will not be released until the end of this month, so it can be said that the situation in February is the latest information.

A big share of the loans people take these days are special home loans.

Until the beginning of this year, the interest rate on the special loan, which was set at a low interest rate, was in the low-to-mid 4% range, so it did little to drag down the interest rate on other commercial loans.

Lending rates may fall further in the future.

For the time being, there is no place to put money except for deposits, but it seems that this frustrating environment will continue for the time being, as interest rates are not high when trying to make deposits, and on the other hand, it is still a little difficult to pay loans casually.