Ecofin has approved an "action plan" to dispose of bank non-performing loans "mainly" with national solutions, based on harmonized criteria. The goal is to create a secondary market for NPLs – which are worth around one thousand billion in the EU, more than 5% of total bank loans – to allow prices to rise to levels closer to the economic value of non-performing loans.
Furthermore, according to the finance ministers of the European Union, greater controls and monitoring are needed to prevent the formation of new Npl bubbles. In particular, it will be necessary to introduce new rules valid for all banks. Among the various actions proposed, the Commission is asked to explore "the potential creation of national companies for asset management", or rather national bad banks to attack non-performing loans.
The requests for action arriving from Ecofin affect various fields: banking supervision, the reform of insolvencies and the regulatory framework for credit recovery, the development of a secondary market for non-performing loans, the restructuring of the banking industry.
