European Central Bank About to Charge Banks to Deposit Money?

The European Central Bank could be going negative soon.

Among the more unusual steps the central bank is considering this week to boost the eurozone's recovery is cutting to below zero the interest rate it pays on money that banks deposit with it. That effectively means banks would have to pay to park money with the ECB — an unorthodox move that has had some success in neighboring Denmark but hasn't been attempted in the much larger eurozone.

The goal: Push banks to lend that money to companies and consumers to get the economy moving.

The ECB, the eurozone's chief monetary authority, has been resisting such a step, which it considered as long ago as summer 2012 but which President Mario Draghi dismissed then as "largely uncharted waters."

But things are now bad enough that many analysts think Draghi and the 23 other members of the ECB's governing council will try the step Thursday and cut the deposit rate from its current record low of zero, perhaps with a rate of minus 0.1 percent. The ECB is also expected to trim its main interest rate, at which it lends to banks, from 0.25 percent to as low as 0.1 percent.

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