Poland has a war on its doorstep. Missiles have exploded within miles of its border and more than five million Ukrainian refugees have fled through the country. But for Poland’s banks, the main impact so far has not been borrowers being unable to pay their loans but the costs of their government’s financial sector policies.
Since the invasion, Polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki has put in place a set of measures that weigh extraordinarily heavily on banks’ profits. Chief among those are sweeping mortgage holidays, announced at the European Economic Congress in April, entirely free of charge to borrowers and potentially costing banks as much as half their profit for the year.
For
