What was warned about has happened. Warning to borrowers

Surprisingly deep cut in the feet @nbppl This resulted in the new benchmark for loan interest rates (WIRON) being higher than the current WIBOR index. “According to the Prime Minister, it was supposed to be the other way around,” Bloomberg News correspondent Konrad Krasowski wrote on X (formerly Twitter).

Let us remind you that work on reforming indicators began in the middle of last year. It started with a loud speech by Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki during the opening of the European Economic Conference in Katowice. Then the Prime Minister announced an aid package for borrowers, and one of the proposals was related to the liquidation of the bank WIBOR. At that time, there was a cycle of interest rate increases, which hurt borrowers.

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According to the reform assumptions, the replacement of the WEBOR index with the new WERON index should be financially neutral for borrowers. For this purpose, a special adjustment factor will be applied that corresponds to the historical difference between these indicators. The reform aims to create an index that determines the interest rate, for example. Mortgages. Presenting this process as a way to reduce loan rates is a misunderstanding – says money.pl Andrzej Powierża, analyst at Dom Maklerski Banku Handlowy.

In the end, the work was organized by the head of the Polish Financial Supervision Authority, Jacek Jastrzebski, a person close to Prime Minister Morawiecki. Not because he wanted to, but because there was no one to accept him. In other countries, such as Canada, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, ratio reform has been coordinated by central banks.

The National Working Group (NGR) is working on the details of the reform. The individual stages of implementation of the new standard on the Polish financial market are described in the “Roadmap”. According to this document, we are in the process of launching, among other things, loans based on the new ratio. For example, ING Bank Śląski offers “popular” real estate loans, and Pekao – loans to businesses. At the end of next year, WIRON will replace WIBOR in all loan agreements. And also an educational campaign which you can read more about here.

According to an analyst at DM Bank Handlowy, it would be a good idea to wait until interest rates stabilize before changing indices. Then the differences between the indicators will be stable for a long time.

Thanks to this, we will avoid additional emotions and misunderstandings accompanying the already complex conversion process. As expected, interest rates will fall over the next two years, so from this point of view, it will not be the optimal moment to complete the index reform, because the amount of the correction index will depend on how long we continue. Use it to your credit – Powierża explains.

As our interlocutor adds, the WIBOR index shows how willing banks are to borrow money, for example in the case of WIBOR 3M – for three months. Thus, the index takes into account expectations regarding future interest rates. On the other hand, WIRON shows how much banks borrow from day to day, and the WIRON 3M index, built on the basis of these transactions, shows the historical interest rate over the past three months.

Currently, the differences between these indicators are decreasing because we are in a rate reduction cycle, which means that WIBOR 3M already takes into account the expected price decline in the next three months, and WIRON 3M shows the average interest rate on transactions concluded in the past. The opposite was true during the cycle of interest rate increases, when the spread between indices increased, Buerza summarizes.

The Stop Bank Lawless Association plans to take the case regarding loans based on the WIBOR rate to the Court of Justice of the European Union. The Association believes that the interest rate on mortgage loans in Poland is too high, and is determined on the basis of the rate determined on the basis of bank advertisements. SBB announced that the first such lawsuit will be filed later this year.

WIBOR has been in business for nearly 30 years. The total agreements based on it – including credit, but not only – amount to about PLN 10 trillion. This is three times the value of our economy. Poland’s GDP is about PLN 3 trillion.

Karolina Wisota, journalist for money.pl