Central banks now play a more active role in macroeconomic management, meaning that they would need to carefully consider the costs and benefits that issuing a digital currency would have for the conduct of monetary policy – the third fact I mentioned before. You can see the potential motivation for this on my next slide.
Although the Eurosystem has been charging an annual interest rate of –0.4% on banks’ excess reserves for more than two years now, almost no euro area banks have passed these negative rates on to their household clients.