Porsche showed it has as much financial opportunism as the bankers who buy its sports cars on Wednesday when it drew down a standing €10bn ($14.7bn) credit line that was about to see time called on its highly favourable terms.

Like a sharp-eyed arbitrageur, the German sports carmaker has spotted that the huge shifts in risk appetite that have rocked the credit markets since last summer means it can earn more from low-risk investment now than it costs to borrow the money.

The move could spell trouble for banks, some analysts believe, because they already face significant constraints on their balance sheets and the availability of funding – particularly if many other companies have negotiated similarly easy credit lines.

“This has to be a worrying thing for the banks involved,” said one London-based analyst.

“If others are also doing this it will be adding an extra strain to banks balance sheets, on top of which you’d have to ask – does Porsche know what it is doing with the investments its going to make?”

Porsche declined to comment on how it would invest the proceeds of the loan. Originally, €35bn in credit was provided by a consortium of ABN Amro, Barclays Capital, Merrill Lynch, UBS and Commerzbank to finance a complete takeover of Volkswagen but Porsche deliberately made a low-ball offer designed to fail. However, it kept open the €10bn credit line to help it finance lifting its stake in VW from 31 per cent to more than 50 per cent.

Porsche agreed to pay interest of 20 basis points, or 0.2 percentage points, more than the euro interbank offered rate for the loan, which matures on June 27, according to Bloomberg.

The move is another example of Porsche’s use of financial trades to hunt for profit, which led to it last year making more than three times as much money – €3.6bn – from trading share options as it did from building cars.

Porsche also made large amounts of money from currency hedging earlier this decade and some analysts have suggested that it is behaving more like a hedge fund than a carmaker.

Although Porsche denied its action had any bearing on its plans for Volkswagen – which have been thrown into confusion by the German government proposing a law protecting Europe’s largest carmaker – it will give it a war-chest on top of its considerable cash reserves to buy further shares when it pleases.