For a fairly long time, the German corporate loan business has been regarded in publications on the subject as leading to value deterioration. On the basis of the bank lending statistics of the Deutsche Bundesbank, our analysis clearly shows a cyclical as well as a structural problem preventing the big four German banks from creating value. In order to analyze possible strategies to solve this issue within a systemic approach, we built a model which included almost 200 variables. Running this model until the year 2010 the outcome is appalling: the break-even return on equity will not be reached. We therefore modelled in a second step the widely discussed strategy of risk adjusted pricing. The outcome raises hope – although this strategy in itself is not sufficient to solve the problem entirely, the return on equity can be increased.