The unfolding economic crisis is throwing up curveballs for investors trying to grasp the logic behind emergency measures that will reshape the way banks report their financial results this year.
Bank of Queensland's chief executive, George Frazis, yesterday tried his best to explain some of the odd-sounding accounting measures that will be applied in the second half of 2020 as borrowers take the opportunity to go on loan repayment holidays.
Investment analysts fired a barrage of questions at the new BOQ boss about how the loan holidays would impact his bank's profit and loss statement in the current six month period, ending August 2020.
Frazis was very clear in at least one of his answers: all loan repayments accruing from borrowers on loan holidays would be reflected in BOQ's final half revenue line.
This means that the unpaid loan instalments will be included in the bank's calculation of "cash earnings" and "statutory profit" even though actual repayments from many borrowers would not have been received by the bank before the year-end balance date.
For now BOQ's medium term assessments of thousands of borrowers' respective capacities to service loans hang on the conditional guarantees that the Morrison Government has given the banking industry as a whole.
However, the veracity of such risk judgements is likely to be tested by auditors who could naturally point to a deteriorating economy and rising unemployment as evidence that not all of the income accrued in the 2020 financial year is likely to be paid.
The scenarios could get even messier if auditors start questioning the assumptions underlying bank executives' decisions not to designate more business loans and mortgages as non-performing in the current financial year.
It would be remiss for auditors to avoid raising such questions - especially if the economic environment deteriorates rapidly in the next few months.
However, Frazis was also adamant about his bank's capital ratios being able to withstand an extreme economic shock in which unemployment soared beyond ten per cent.
Under such a scenario Frazis said a preliminary stress test by the bank indicated that BOQ's CET1 capital ratio was likely to remain above 9 per cent.
That's a confident statement to be making just as a small regional bank enters a treacherous economic environment.
Perhaps the big takeaway from the BOQ interim profit announcement is that while banks are positioned to function as "economic shock-absorbers" for a short-lived recession, their businesses have been generously greased by support from the government and a funding backstop from the Reserve Bank.
Banks and their industry advocate - the Australian Banking Association - may need to be more careful about the lengths they go to depict customer hardship packages offered by lenders as evidence of the industry making sacrifices.
If Frazis' commentary about the likely capital and income impacts of the COVID-19 crisis applies to the industry more generally, then it sounds like Australian banks might weather the next six months without having to give up much at all.
Many other segments of the Australian economy have been afforded much less state protection.
In fact the government is demanding more tangible sacrifices from other types of businesses, including commercial property owners now expected to forego rents.
And there has been no support for self-funded retirees, who presumably will be expected to take less rent from tenants occupying residential properties.
As yet, no politician has asked the banks of Australia to waive a single dollar of interest owed to them.
BOQ's interim profit announcement indicates the industry has no plans for that either.