Yes, the man is totally deranged, and so is the entire eurozone policy apparatus. Like much of officialdom elsewhere in the world, the ECB is attempting to fight low growth and low inflation with monetary nitroglycerin. It’s only a matter of time before they blow the whole financial works sky high.

Low real GDP growth in the eurozone has absolutely nothing to do with the difference between –0.3% on the ECB deposit rate versus the new -0.4% dictate announced this morning; nor does QE bond purchases of EUR 80 billion per month compared to the prior EUR 60 billion rate have anything to do with it, either. The only purpose of such heavy handed financial intrusion is to make borrowing cheaper for households and businesses.

But here’s what the moronic Mario doesn’t get. The European private sector don’t want no more stinkin’ debt; they are up to their eyeballs in it already, and have been for the better part of a decade.

The growth problem in Europe is due to too much socialist welfare and too much statist taxation and regulation, not too little private borrowing. These are issues for fiscal policy and elected politicians, not central bank apparatchiks.

As shown in the chart below, the eurozone private sector had its final borrowing binge during the initial decade of the single currency regime through 2008; debts outstanding grew at the unsustainable rate of 7.5% annually. But since then the eurozone private sector has self-evidently been stranded on the shoals of Peak Debt.

Outstandings have flat-lined for the past eight years—-not withstanding increasingly heavy doses of ECB interest rate repression that have finally taken money market rates into the netherworld of subzero.

Nor has the approximate EUR $700 billion of bond purchases since QE’s inception last March made one wit of difference. Bank loans outstanding to the private sector were EUR 10.24 trillion at the end of January or exactly where they stood in March 2015 when Draghi and his merry band of money printers went all in.