He said the ECB was "technically ready" to take the interest rate on its deposit facility into negative territory - in other words, to charge banks to park their cash with the central bank.
That was on the deposit rate, the rate put on money left by commercial banks at the central bank, which it normally earns interest on.
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Eurodollar futures and options, where investors hedged or speculated on the interest rate paid on a 90-day deposit of a dollar overseas, were half of the Merc's business, with 1.5 million contracts traded per day.
However, when central banks pay interest on reserves or a deposit facility, this interest rate is rarely the one used to set the target for short-term private sector borrowing rates.
The most the ECB has done to try and encourage more lending is cut its overnight deposit rate, in other words paying less interest on money it borrows from banks overnight.
On Thursday, the European Central Bank cut its official deposit rate for overnight lending to the central bank by 50 basis points, to 1.0%, below its 2.5% benchmark rate, in an attempt to wean banks off the safety of its vaults and thus stimulate interbank lending.
However, customers who need to borrow less than 75% by putting down a bigger deposit are being offered cheaper deals on tracker and fixed-rate mortgages.
On the other hand, too lax policy, such as keeping the real deposit rate deeply negative, could fuel asset price bubbles that, by definition, eventually burst.
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Simultaneously, the ceiling on bank deposit rates was raised to 1.1x from 1.0x the benchmark rate, and the floor for lending rates was lowered to 0.8x from 0.9x.
But in China, where most savings are in the form of bank deposits and where earnings on savings are a significant portion of total household earnings, lowering deposit rates tends to increase the savings rate.
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