Frankfurt am Main — Banks rushed for a final round of cheap long-term loans from the European Central Bank, the Frankfurt institution said on Thursday, as signs mount that the cost of money may soon rise. About 474 banks borrowed a total of €233.5bn ($252bn) — almost a fourfold increase compared with the €62.2bn lent out by the ECB at the last round in December. Subtracting loans that banks used to repay old debts to the ECB, the amount of new cash pumped into the economy stood at €216bn, an ECB spokeswoman said, still more than four times larger than the December figure. More than twice as many banks took part in March compared with the 200 reported in December. Analysts’ estimates of how much banks would want to borrow on Thursday had varied wildly, from a few tens of billions to hundreds of billions of euros. It was "the last chance to get funding at a very cheap level", UniCredit economists noted ahead of the release. Launched in 2015, the ECB last March extended its quarterly T...
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