Will unproductive firms, which should actually go under, survive due to cheap loans? Are we delaying the process of creative destruction by providing cheap money? That’s a fair question. We are monitoring this. If you take a macroeconomic perspective, you can see that on average firms have become more resilient and stronger. The problem is that this average can mask large differences.
For that reason we are now looking at firms’ balance sheets ‘bottom up' the IMF does this too. That is the only way we can simulate – firm by firm – whether they can survive a large rise in interest expenses following an ECB rate increase. We see great progress in countries like Spain, but more needs to be done.