Sina US stocks, November 13, Beijing time. Italian banks are making full use of the ECB's new negative interest rate stratification system to attract additional deposits as cash flows out of the core countries of the Eurozone.

According to data from the Bank of Italy, Italian banks' deposits with the ECB increased by 37 billion euros (41 billion US dollars) to 137.8 billion euros. Meanwhile, other central bank data shows that Italy's debt to other countries in the Eurozone fell by a record, while Germany's net debt fell even more.

The ECB has been seeking to stimulate growth and inflation for five years by charging banks on overnight deposits at the central bank. When the ECB cut interest rates further below zero in September, it sought to offset the damage to bank earnings by exempting negative interest rates on some deposits.

This threshold is set at six times the bank's minimum reserve requirement. If banks such as Italy do not exceed this threshold, they can absorb funds from foreign entities and deposit the funds into the ECB at zero cost, thereby avoiding the fees that banks with large deposits, such as Germany, have to pay.

“On the first day of operation of the two-tier interest rate system, we observed a significant redistribution of excess liquidity,” ECB Executive Board member Benoit Coeur said in Frankfurt on Tuesday. “It's common to leave countries with abundant liquidity, such as Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands, and move to countries with unused quotas, such as Italy.”