Typically, governments hold cash reserves in their central bank as foreign exchange reserves for the purpose of stabilizing currency and management of liquidity.
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The truck was delivering the cash to a bank in central Frankfurt when the 23-year-old French driver pulled into a car park and pulled a gun on his colleague.
In Europe, banks are still parking their cash in the safety of the European Central Bank, even after the ECB made doing so more expensive in hopes of boosting interbank lending.
For example, you didn't mention that the recent interest-rate rise on January 31st followed both an unexpected increase in the cash reserve ratio by the central bank and cuts to import duty on several items by the government in order to check inflation.
On this score, reality is dawning on policy makers: Last week, Bank of England Governor Mervyn King, the high priest of the global regulatory onslaught, called for a rethink of the Basel liquidity rules that have led banks to hoard cash in ultra-low-yielding central bank reserves and government bonds.
They are reluctant to forgo profitable lending just to protect themselves against the remote chances of a liquidity shock especially when, in a crisis, the central bank is likely to step in with extra cash.
It is not unusual for the European Central Bank to lend cash to banks in the Eurozone.
By joining the U.S. Federal Reserve and other major central banks in flooding the economy with cash, the Bank of Japan hopes to get corporations and consumers to begin spending more and end a long malaise.
And if central bankers sought to control money, however defined, by targeting the monetary base cash in circulation and commercial-bank reserves held with the central bank they lost control of the short-term interest rate, which might move erratically and damage the economy.
It reduced the discount rate, at which banks finding themselves short of cash can, in the spirit of Bagehot, borrow from the central bank, and lengthened the term for which it would lend.
They have a strong cash position, Central Bank officials said during the Russia Calling conference in Moscow last week.
What they say occurs is that the central bank forces those in the economy to hold more cash than they really want.
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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.
Most banks that now have cash prefer to deposit funds at the European Central Bank (ECB), which in turn lends it on to those that are short of it.
Higher reserve requirements in the euro zone mean that its central bank has to inject more cash than the Fed to achieve the same effect, says Julian Callow at Barclays Capital.
The government, via the offices of the central bank, agrees to fund banks with as much cash as they need in order to be able to pay off depositors.
The central bank has also shifted towards a tighter stance in recent weeks, withdrawing cash from the economy via its open-market operations.
If inflation continues to decline in the months ahead, as the government expects following four months of monetary and fiscal measures designed to curb credit and cash flow, then the Central Bank will likely keep the Selic rate unchanged barring any surprises in demand in the third quarter.
It also means, he said, that deposits held at Bitcoin-Central would be backed by the same compensation laws and schemes that apply to cash held in other bank accounts.
Zimbabwe's cash-starved banks, and a central bank that has lost control of its currency, mirror challenges in other countries, including Greece, Malawi and Swaziland.
The Federal Reserve has been flooding the banking system with cash, so much so in the last week that it has pushed the effective overnight interest rate below the central bank's target 2%.
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