I am afraid that you are talking about a different albeit related phenomenon: that of business confidence, a lagging indicator of the state of an economy while we were talking about confidence in the context of public confidence in the banking system.
The former is being measured by the NAB in Australia (The NAB Business Confidence Index) while the latter by the Gallup poll in the USA, and to my understanding confidence in the banking system has been on the increase since the GFC hit the global economy, at least in America. See graph bellow.
However, what seems to have made the headless chooks runing for cover while screaming "we are all going to die, we are all going to die" were news that the Bank of England either should - the link did not work - or was contemplating to introduce a tax on excess reserves.
Imo that would only affect the big players because if my bankers ever decide to pass to me the costs to them of such tax (yes, negative interest rates imposed by the ARB would be a tax) I would simply take my money home.
Obviously, that negative rates are just a tool designed to induce the big players to do something other than parking their excess cash with the Bank of England.
Curiously, although I am not a smart-aleck logic tells me that the move from cash to gold, with everything else staying the same, would only be justifiable if the storage costs for cash were expected to exceed those for gold.
