Know anybody who had to borrow €3bn suddenly over the weekend? A surge in overnight emergency lending by the European Central Bank has become a talking point in financial markets. Use of its marginal lending facility, which incurs a penal interest rate, jumped at the end of last week and stayed above €3bn on Monday or Tuesday. Was a eurozone bank in trouble? Or was the urgent need for extra liquidity just due to a technical hitch, perhaps related to the start of a new ECB monthly lending cycle?

In the event, it may have been more technicalities than trauma. Use of the facility slumped to just €52m overnight from Wednesday. Whoever need the money appears to have turned to the latest ECB regular weekly offer of liquidity instead, at which banks’ demands continue to be met in full. But minds are not totally at ease. “It’s difficult to say for sure whether this was a genuine funding issue for some banks or one particular bank, or just some adverse liquidity management,” says Nick Matthews, European economist at Royal Bank of Scotland.

The ECB does not help in such cases by refusing to comment. But its silence makes sense in the long-run. Knowledge that they could turn anonymously to the ECB has probably helped many a bank out of scrapes in the past few years.

The more serious point is that this kind of scare justifies ECB caution when it comes to withdrawing the emergency liquidity measures taken since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. Unlimited offers of one-year liquidity ended in December and March’s offer of six-month liquidity will also be the last. My guess is that next month’s ECB governing council meeting will also see a return to a pre-crisis auction system for some offers of three month liquidity.

Even before this week’s events, however, it was clear it would be sometime before the ECB stops meeting in full demands for liquidity in its regular weekly operations. Eurozone banks are not yet ready to have all the cushions taken away.