The 1990s were a lost decade for Japan. The 2000s delivered a lost decade to U.S. investors. Now, five years into the onset of the financial crisis, with stock and bond markets booming, housing resurgent, and even Detroit redeemed, it’s savers who find themselves in a lost decade.

This runs counter to the lessons of the credit bubble. We were urged to spend less, save more, tell fewer lies on our mortgage applications. Problem is, the jumbo monetary response to that era’s excesses—0 percent interest rates, followed by trillions in quantitative easing and a vow to keep rates this low until at least 2015—is bent on getting people and companies spending and investing (and out of cash) at pretty much any cost.

Five years ago, the average money-market fund yielded 0.93 percent, while a one- and five-year certificate of deposit yielded 3.75 percent and 4 percent, respectively, according to Bankrate. So $10,000 parked in a CD would earn approximately $400 a year. After taxes and inflation, that might leave just enough for date night at Ruth’s Chris.

Today, with the Fed having done everything in its power (and then some) to jackhammer down the Treasury curve, the average money-market fund yields 0.12 percent, which is bank boilerplate for nothing. A one-year CD offers 0.30 percent, and a 5-year certificate pays 1 percent. Your aforementioned 10 grand—no doubt dearer to you in this era of chronically high unemployment and uncertainty about retirement—huffs and puffs to produce a mere $100 in annual income. Back out taxes and inflation, and you’re losing money in a bank account—however FDIC-insured it may be.

“Policymakers had to pick between saving the system and punishing the savers, or letting the market fail and punishing everybody,” says Michael Livian, a Manhattan money manager who has written (PDF) on what’s increasingly being called the financial repression exacted by negative real interest rates. “They went for the first one.”

Policymakers call this recapitalizing the banking system. That’s so much euphemism for transferring wealth from depositors to taxpayer-rescued banks (and, at least theoretically, their borrowers). The banks are not exactly being bashful about the great deal they’re enjoying at the expense of cheap or free customer deposits. Consider: Only 39 percent of non-interest checking accounts are now free to all customers, compared with 76 percent in 2009, according to Bankrate. It says the average monthly service fee on checking accounts is at a record $5.48, up 25 percent in a year. It should thus come as little surprise that, subprime lessons be damned, the nation’s personal saving rate is declining (PDF). In desirable, heal-thyself-consumer fashion, saving spiked at the onset of the Great Recession after hitting a generational low at the peak of the housing boom.

Read More at businessweek.com. By Roben Farzad.