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By Bloomberg

Six years after a credit crunch that threatened the global financial system, European banks are prepared to pay a fee to lend to their peers.

The rate at which the region’s banks say they see each other lending in euros for one month dropped below zero for the first time, according to the European Money Markets Institute. That’s a turnaround from September 2008, when the rate climbed to a record 5.197 percent as Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.’s collapse triggered a global recession and froze capital markets.

The euro interbank offered rate, or Euribor, for such one- month loans dropped to minus 0.002 percent today, EMMI data showed. That’s the first negative reading since Bloomberg started collecting the data in 1998. It has averaged 2.23 percent in that period. The three-month rate fell to a record 0.056 percent today.

Money-market rates have dropped since the European Central Bank introduced a negative deposit rate in June last year, meaning that commercial lenders were required to pay a fee to park their excess cash overnight with the institution. ECB policy makers cut the deposit rate to minus 0.2 percent in September, which is more expensive than the rate at which peers lend to each other for a month.

ECB officials are scheduled to announce their next monetary policy decision on Jan. 22 amid speculation central-bank President Mario Draghi will introduce a program of buying the region’s sovereign bonds to stave off deflation.