Central banks can stimulate the economy with money no one takes
The central bank's emergency funding scheme works perfectly as long as no one actually uses it.
What happened
Central bank funding makes private lending cheaper, even if banks do not use it. The mere availability of public money reduces the cost of private wholesale funding for banks. This means banks exposed to wholesale funding markets lend more, regardless of whether they actually take central bank money.
Why it matters
Central banks spent years trying to stimulate lending without bloating their balance sheets. It turns out they just need to bluff. By offering money with strings attached, they force private lenders to lower their rates. They fix the market without spending a dime.
The signal
This looks like a dry technical paper on wholesale funding frictions until a central bank governor uses it to justify an unlimited lending facility that issues zero loans. Central banks are going to start designing liquidity programs specifically to be rejected. They will announce infinite funding capacity paired with above-market penalty rates, knowing the announcement alone forces private lenders to drop their own rates. The catch is that private lenders will likely call this bluff during the next actual crisis. They know the central bank does not actually want to deploy the capital.
The central bank created an emergency public liquidity scheme to rescue banks from wholesale funding stress. The banks immediately used the announcement as leverage to borrow from someone else.