The streets of Frankfurt may not be paved with gold, but they’re using hundred-euro notes as wallpaper in its main bank today. The European Central Bank there took a total of one third of a trillion euros in deposit yesterday (easily the highest ever level) as banks stopped lending to each other.

In fact, the banks aren’t lending to anyone, which must be bad for business: a grand total of just 9 million euros went from the ECB to banks – or just 0.025% of the deposits flying in the opposite direction. This wasn’t the idea the Central Bank started out with.

The Frankfurt-based bank has become a safe haven – but more importantly, these insane inflows are a reflection of interbank mistrust. Interbank mistrust goes like this:

“Look guys – if our lending book is this awful, chances are that Dummkopf & Cul down the road’s is even worse. So whatever you do, don’t lend to them”.

Or put another way, there is an Andean mountain range of toxic debt backed up by worthless collateral right across the continent – until, in fact, you get to the Urals: then it gets much, much worse.

“The banking crisis is back,” an interest-rate strategist at Commerzbank AG in London, Norbert Aul, told Bloomberg this morning. “The news flow over the past few weeks has spooked banks and since nobody knows how exposed individual financial institutions are, it’s deemed safer to park cash with the ECB rather than lend it on.”

Now where have we heard that one before? . So despite buying all the sovereign bonds and taking all the banking cash, the Central Bank looked on helplessly as the Euro began falling again versus all the major currencies this afternoon.

The Slog exclusively revealed a growing ECB Board split between the Trichet and Austro-German factions last month. Sources this afternoon suggested that this had become ” a bitter battle bordering on panic”.