The banks, too, need to make efforts to ready themselves to weather changes in the macroeconomic climate. After all, an economic slowdown might also be accompanied by a renewed rise in credit risk. One of the side-effects of ultra-accommodative monetary policy is that the longer the lowinterest-rate environment persists, the greater the strain on banks becomes.
An abrupt rise in interest rates would then take a particularly heavy toll on banks’ earnings – such is the finding of our low-interest-rate survey that we, together with BaFin, conducted once again last year among the banks that we supervise.