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Investors buying U.S. Treasury bills maturing in January and February Thursday were actually willing to pay the government to hold their money for them.

The yield on these securities fell into negative territory, sinking to minus 0.03 per cent. Who would make such an investment? It’s a rare phenomenon to see T-bills with negative interest rates, although it happened last year after Lehman Brothers went bankrupt and investors panicked for safety.

David Rosenberg, chief economist & strategist at Gluskin Sheff + Associates, says it happened again on Thursday after U.S. banks scrambled to add low-risk assets to their balance sheets before year end. “We can only say that if the markets and the macroeconomic backdrop have truly come back to normal, this is hardly a condition we would be seeing right now. The financial system is still far from healthy, even as bonus season looms on Wall Street,” he wrote in his morning note Friday.

But Vincent Fernando, a writer for The Money Game and an adviser to the multi-strategy fund Railay Capital Partners, says this bit of fall cleaning by the banks should not be blown out of proportion.

“This time around it appears there is simply too much money that wants to sit tight and look respectable come year-end. Which means that we shouldn't read too much from the negative T-bill yield and this will eventually rebound back to at least 0 per cent, once the year-end regulatory dance comes to an end.”