The negotiators for a traffic light coalition want the development bank to play an important role in the climate-neutral restructuring of the economy.
(Photo: dpa)
Frankfurt After the corona crisis has subsided, the new KfW boss Stefan Wintels wants to focus the state development bank primarily on climate protection and digitization. “Fortunately, we are seeing a decline in the demand for Corona aid,” said Wintels when the quarterly figures were presented.
“Now we have to concentrate on the challenges our country is facing: two of them are undisputed climate and environmental protection as well as digitalization and innovation,” explained Wintels. Essentially, it is about the sustainable restructuring of German industry and the long-term international competitiveness of the country.
Wintels is thus in line with the ideas of politics, which would like KfW to play an important role in the transformation of the German economy. The representatives of a possible traffic light coalition made up of the SPD, the Greens and the FDP want to invest in climate protection on the one hand, but on the other hand neither want to violate the debt brake nor increase taxes. That is why the traffic light negotiators rely on the development bank, 80 percent of which is owned by the federal government and 20 percent by the federal states.
The CEO of the sustainable GLS Bank, Thomas Jorberg, warns clearly against an overly active role of the development bank. “I do not believe in making KfW a major lender for the transformation of the economy,” he said in an interview with the Handelsblatt.
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KfW is already “the fiercest competitor in the market for all other credit institutions. If KfW finances even half of the funds required for the conversion, it will dominate the German banking market, ”argued Jorberg. “This would depress the interest rate for risky investments so much that the financing of these companies and projects for the commercial banks would be unattractive.”
In the opinion of the new CEO of the development bank, climate protection and digitization are probably the most important challenges for the German economy – and thus an important area of responsibility for KfW.
(Photo: dpa)
It is unclear exactly what the role of KfW should look like – but it is likely to be significant. Still-SPD party leader Norbert Walter-Borjans spoke of expanding KfW into an “investment and innovation agency for new infrastructure, digitization and decarbonization”. FDP boss Christian Lindner is also open to an important role for the development bank, because it has experience with “activating private credit funds through state guarantees”.
GLS boss Jorberg has concerns: “The consequence would be that private investment will decline – which in turn will slow down the transformation,” he says.
From his point of view, politics should start elsewhere: “They should set framework conditions, for example sharply increasing the C02 price and introducing a tax on spray and fertilizers in agriculture. There should be state investments and grants where the transformation by companies and private donors does not succeed or where social injustice arises. “
In past crises, politicians had repeatedly relied on KfW, especially during the corona pandemic. Thanks to loans for which the state has largely or fully assumed liability, it should have prevented a massive credit crunch in the corona year 2020. Since the start of the aid programs in March 2020, KfW has so far pledged 59.8 billion euros in Germany and abroad.
The boom is now ebbing. In the first nine months of this year, the funding volume of 73.1 billion euros was well below the record value of 109.1 billion euros in the previous year. Compared to the pre-Corona year 2019, when the commitments between January and September were 53.5 billion euros, KfW still funded a relatively large amount. One of the reasons for this is that there were more new commitments in the field of energy efficiency and renewable energies.
More: All-purpose weapon KfW – How the development bank should save the traffic light plans.