Today, industry offers standalone or hybrid Islamic products, offers capital markets options for fund management, insurance products via takaful, and meets requirements for sovereign, corporate and retail sector. To ensure competitiveness and customer acceptability, replication and aligning of returns on Islamic products with conventional products has generated concerns regarding dilution and excessive concentration of banks on one or two products.
It’s claimed that the ECB is penalising savers, destroying the banks’ business models and ultimately doing more harm than good. My point of view in this debate has always been that low interest rates are justified. Interest rate cuts are the “normal”, the called-for, monetary policy measure of a central bank when inflation is well below the objective.