There aren't many interest rates that match inflation these days: savers continue to be fobbed off by banks for their savings with small rewards that are still deep in negative after inflation is factored in.

But the turnaround in interest rates is now causing an interest rate to climb above the inflation rate of 10 percent: the overdraft interest that holders of current accounts have to pay for an overdraft within the agreed overdraft limit has risen to an average of 10.052 percent, according to figures from the consumer platform Biallo.

Commerzbank, Hypovereinsbank, DKB: Many institutes have increased these interest rates in recent weeks, as the Internet platform Konto.org has compiled.

For individual banks, the percentage increase was even up to 41 percent.

Christian Siedenbiedel

Editor in Business.

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This could also be important because high energy bills could drive one or the other consumer into overdrafts over the course of the winter.

At the beginning of the year, around 6.6 million Germans should have overdrawn their account, as the Internet platform Smava calculated.

That should have been 17 percent more than a year ago.

If the higher utility bills for tenants gradually arrive because the gas price has risen sharply, the number of overdrawn accounts could continue to increase.

Political debate picks up speed again

No wonder that the political debate about capping overdraft interest is picking up speed again.

The SPD parliamentary group in Schleswig-Holstein has presented the latest proposal.

The idea is: The overdraft interest should be linked to a reference interest rate and should not exceed this by more than 6 percentage points.

Even higher interest rates for an overdraft on the current account beyond the agreed limit should no longer be permitted.

At least in principle, black-green could also be convinced in Kiel, so that it is now a Federal Council initiative.

The financial policy spokeswoman for the Kiel SPD parliamentary group, Beate Raudies, justified the initiative by saying that overdraft facilities could be used to bridge unforeseen bottlenecks - but they could also become a debt trap,

Julian Merzbacher, spokesman for the Finanzwende citizens' movement founded by Gerhard Schick, a former Green member of the Bundestag, says: "Especially in a crisis that is not due to their fault, credit institutions should show moderation and not call for exorbitant lending rates." In principle, it would be understandable if, in view of the increases in key interest rates, overdraft interest rates also rose: "But even before the interest rate hike, these were in the double-digit range at many banks and savings banks and thus far too high."

The banks often justify the high overdraft interest by saying that the overdraft facility is only intended to bridge short-term liquidity bottlenecks - in particular, there is no check of the bank customer's creditworthiness.

Nevertheless, politicians had introduced stricter rules for overdrafts six years ago.

Among other things, the banks now have to write to their customers if they have largely exhausted their overdraft facility for a long time - and offer them a cheaper loan to replace the overdraft facility.

But a cap had been waived.

Lower interest rates during the pandemic

In the Corona crisis, a number of banks and savings banks had significantly reduced overdraft interest.

Led by the Frankfurter Sparkasse, some had halved this in spring 2020 in order to give their existing customers some relief in the crisis.

In Saarland, this initiative found a prominent advocate in the former Federal Minister of Finance, Oskar Lafontaine.

Gradually, however, most institutes returned to roughly their old interest rates.

An exception seems to be the Taunussparkasse in Bad Homburg, which reduced its overdraft interest from 9.93 percent to almost 5 percent during the crisis - and according to the website is currently charging 5.99 percent.

Before the general election, some of the parties in the traffic light coalition held out the prospect of political intervention in overdraft interest – but these plans have not been implemented, at least so far.

The Greens in particular had announced that they would work to ensure that the overdraft interest would be capped in the event of a possible government participation.

The Greens member of the Bundestag, Stefan Schmidt, had represented the assessment that an appropriate interest rate could be around 6 percent.

Similar to the proposal from Schleswig-Holstein, the federal SPD had brought an upper limit of six percentage points above a fluctuating reference interest rate into play.

For this you can take the base rate determined by the Bundesbank, it said – or the lowest interest rate for installment loans.

In a time of high inflation like the current one, debtors tend to benefit from the devaluation of all nominal amounts – just as savers with financial assets are among those who suffer.

The overdrafts also lose value over time due to inflation.

Only: In practice, this is only of use to an overdraft debtor if his income also increases with inflation and he can then repay the overdraft facility more easily in this way - which is often not the case at the moment.