National Bank of Poland. NBP ended 2023 with a big loss, the amount of the loss was announced

“The financial result of NBP for 2023 was negative (loss) and amounted to PLN -20,800,024.0 thousand (for 2022, the loss amounted to PLN -16,943,670.7 thousand). The negative financial result for the financial year is subject to accumulation in the Loss item from previous years,” NBP wrote. The central bank announced that the uncovered loss from previous years amounts to PLN 27,401,680.0 thousand. zloty.

Let us recall that the Law and Justice government expected that NBP would record a profit in 2023. “In 2024, according to information received from the NBP, the payment to the state budget due to the payment from the NBP profit will amount to PLN 6 billion” – we could read in the justification to the draft budget act, which was published in August last year, when Mateusz Morawiecki was Prime Minister.

According to the Act on the National Bank of Poland, if the central bank generates a profit, it receives 95%. this amount is transferred to the state budget.

The NBP later explained that it received an inquiry from the Ministry of Finance regarding the planned financial result in August last year. “Then, the estimated positive financial outlook of approximately PLN 6 billion was included in the draft budget with the reservation that it was 'subject to great uncertainty', as both the National Bank of Poland and the Ministry of Finance always point out,” we read in the release.

The central bank noted that “in the following months, this estimate changed dramatically, mainly due to the very rapid increase in the exchange rate of the Polish zloty against the main currencies.” According to the NBP, the possibility of a negative financial result in 2023 “was widely known for the following months, starting from September, and formally at least since December 11 last year, when the national media reported on the approval of the Management Board of the NBP financial plan for 2024.”

This year is the second year in a row in which the state budget is not supported by a transfer from the National Bank of Poland. The central bank also suffered a loss in 2022, amounting to approximately PLN 16.94 billion. Therefore, due to the recorded loss, the central bank did not make a payment from the profit to the state budget in 2023.

For comparison, in 2021, NBP had a profit of PLN 10.97 billion and in 2022 it paid nearly PLN 844.5 million to the state budget. The surplus over the forecast specified in the Budget Act for 2022 – amounting to approximately PLN 9.6 billion – went to the COVID-19 Counteracting Fund. In turn, in 2020, the central bank had a profit of PLN 9.34 billion and in 2021 it paid over PLN 8.87 billion to the budget.