A day ahead of a crucial meeting of regulators in Basel that aims to decide exactly how much more capital banks will need to hold in future, the Federal Association of German banks, or BdB, warned again that new and overzealous measures could derail the economy by making it more difficult for banks to lend.

"Whoever goes too far here will jeopardise the economic recovery and the positive developments on the labour market," the BdB's deputy chairman Hans-Joachim Massenberg said in a statement.