And you thought your bank rate was bad ... Toyota's 0% offer

If you think your bank deposit rate is bad take a look at the bonds Toyota just issued. Photo / 123RF

And you thought your bank deposit rate was bad ...

Toyota Finance, a division of the Japanese auto-giant, just issued 20 billion yen ($290 million) worth of three-year and five-year bonds yielding a record low rate 0.0000000091 per cent.

Yes, you can call that zero per cent for short.

Technically, if you bought one billion yen worth of them and held them to maturity you'd still not make a single yen.

In a reminder of the weird state of the global economy right now - demand was actually quite strong, according to Bloomberg news.

The Toyota bonds are being called as the lowest-yielding corporate debt offer in the world.

Okay, plenty has been written about negative-yielding bonds - there's now US$17 trillion in the market.

But typically they are called negative yielding because of the price that bond traders are prepared to pay for them is higher than their yield over their remaining life.

Traders can still make money if sentiment gets even worse and they can onsell the bonds for an even higher value.

The Toyota bonds offer investors a similar play based on the prospect of the Japanese central bank buying them for a higher price at some point as part of its ongoing quantitative-easing programme.

How that all adds up to meaningful wealth creation out in the real world is extremely hard to fathom.

But as interest rates creep lower, and persistent low growth and low inflation becomes the norm, Japan has increasingly become the economy to watch for clues to the future.

It's been living with it for a long time, running "near zero" monetary policy since 1995.

Japan is one of a handful of nations that now has a negative central bank rate (-0.1 per cent).

Other super-low rate economies include Switzerland and Sweden. Euro zone rates are at zero and Danish rates are close, at just 0.05 per cent.

A Danish bank recently made headlines by being the first to offer a negative mortgage rate to borrowers.

In theory that sounds like the bank would pay you to take their cash but in reality a complicated system involving fees and peer-to-peer lending means the bank still clips the ticket.

In New Zealand, the official cash rate has been cut twice this year, to a record low of 1 per cent.

Reserve Bank Governor Adrian Orr has said he wouldn't rule out going negative if conditions warranted.

That seems unlikely.

But as global economic conditions deteriorate and central banks head into increasing unconventional territory, we can no doubt expect to see more of these mind-bendingly complex investment products hitting the market.

Strange days indeed.