While the formal decision of the ECB Council to impose interest on Target claims and liabilities is meaningless, this paper shows that the pooling of primary interest income among national central banks in the Eurozone implies that Target and cash balances do, in fact, bear an effective rate of...

Chapter 1: Target: An obscure aspect of the Eurosystem -- Chapter 2: The Target credit -- Chapter 3: Current account, capital movements and Target balances -- Chapter 4: The cash balance -- Chapter 5: How the Target balances came about: the first phase of the crisis -- Chapter 6: The case of...

Target balances are the largest single item in some of the balance sheets of the Eurosystem’s national central banks (NCBs), and yet very little is known about them by the general public and even by economists. This book shows that Target balances measure overdraft credits between the NCBs...