The Bank For International Settlements just released a report stating that the spread of negative interest rates hasn’t caused the world to end. From this morning’s Bloomberg:

Negative Interest Rates Are Working Just Fine So Far: BIS

Negative interest-rate policies currently in use by central banks around the world have worked through their respective systems in much the same way as positive rates, though it’s not known how far below zero that would continue to be the case, the Bank for International Settlements said.

In its quarterly report published Sunday, the Basel-based “central bank for central banks” said that “so far, zero has not proved to be a technically binding lower limit for central bank policy rates.”

The BIS’s verdict on negative rates gives backing to the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan and others at a time when such unconventional methods are facing increasing criticism for their potential impact on the financial industry and currency markets. A sell-off in European bank stocks this year was partly driven by fears that further rate cuts by the ECB would damage profitability in a sector still recovering from the debt crisis.

“The experience so far suggests that modestly negative policy rates are transmitted to money-market rates in very much the same way as positive rates are,” report authors Morten Bech and Aytek Malkhozov said. “Anecdotal evidence suggests banks seek to avoid negative rates by either extending maturities or lending to riskier counterparties.”

The report also presented calculations of the average effective rate that banks pay on cash above the minimum requirements or exemptions at the ECB, the Swiss National Bank, the Riksbank and the Danish central bank, showing that a lower negative policy rate doesn’t necessarily translate into a more expensive proposition for lenders.

The BIS report does include some caveats along the lines of “it’s early in the process and there’s no way to know if more deeply negative rates will cause trouble.” Still, the idea that the system isn’t being stressed by negative rates is belied by some trends that have gotten a fair bit of press lately. Consider: