From the 2026 budget audit
State-directed lending: a bank that chooses winners no market price selects
500 millió Ft channelled through the Magyar Fejlesztési Bank into development-loan programmes — capital directed by administrative project selection rather than by risk pricing.
Roughly 125 Ft per taxpayer per year — 500 millió Ft total, a small line that follows the same mechanism as the larger credit-subsidy schemes.
What you see — and what you don't
The seen: businesses receiving development loans through a state institution at terms the market would not offer. The unseen: the projects passed over because capital has been directed to the bank's administrative choices rather than to whoever the market would price as the better risk.
Objection
"Development banks exist in every modern economy — they fund long-horizon investments the private market won't."
Answer
Long-horizon investment gaps are real where they exist. The question is whether administrative project selection — which project does the bank choose, by what criterion — outperforms the market's risk pricing. Where a genuine market failure is identified and narrow, targeted support is defensible; a general MFB programme line with no named market-failure and no evidence of additionality is a discretionary capital allocation dressed in development language.
Share if you think capital should flow where it earns a return, not where an institution decides to lend.
The analyst's verdict
Hungarian Development Bank loan programmes
Rationale
A small line funding subsidised lending programmes channelled through the Magyar Fejlesztési Bank (Hungarian Development Bank). State development-bank lending substitutes administrative project selection for the market's pricing of risk and return, directing capital toward projects chosen by the bank rather than projects that clear a market test. The line is small, so the phase-out is correspondingly short — three years to allow in-flight programme commitments to conclude — but the classification follows the mechanism, not the size.
Transition mechanism
Three-year phase-out; existing programme commitments run to conclusion; no new subsidised programmes.
Affected groups
Borrowers under existing MFB programmes (protected to term); the MFB.
Free Society Institute
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