Mr Kösters, you have been a member of the RWI’s Board of Directors since 2003 in your function as an academic manager. It is partly down to you, then, that the RWI ranks among Germany’s foremost economic research and policy consulting institutions.
Many Islamic financial institutions have built up a comparatively high exposure to the real estate sector. In part, this is the consequence of the requirement for Sharia-compliant institutions to have a real asset to back their financial assets. Nonetheless, these exposures also have a downside, as the experience of the past few years has reminded us.