“Banks are looking for good initiatives for healthy jobs. I hope that in one of the next months we can have a recovery in bonds and in the overall loan figure”. This was stated by Antonio Patuelli, number one of ABI, during a press conference at Palazzo Altieri.
“I trust – he added – that the international recovery, the weakening of the euro against the dollar, of which the symptoms are visible, the increase in exports and tourist flows, the operations carried out by the government for the recovery of construction and the return of Italian confidence in Italy will produce an inversion of the cycle”.
In short, there are the "requisites for a bottom-up recovery" of the Italian economy, claims the president of the Association, also because the 200 basis point spread "frees up capital for credit", in the context of "a propulsive climate that it does not wait for institutional policies, because if we were to do so we would not grasp the international recovery and the national repercussions".
Patuelli then said he was "bored" by those who remember that banks have portfolios full of government bonds: "It's a superficial view", he said, underlining that in the autumn of 2011, faced with the flight of foreign investors by Italian government bonds for the sovereign debt crisis, "if the banks and insurance companies had not intervened with a greater national commitment and there had been no support from the ECB, our rates would have shot up to the levels of the lira at the time, at two digits, and it would have been a crazy risk for productive and labor Italy”.
Not only. The President of ABI also disputes the idea that in Italy in the last two years there has been a real credit crunch: "From 1.900 billion in loans, an all-time high reached in 2008, we are now at 1.840 billion, i.e. close to to the top of the mountain, despite the spread and the new Basel rules”.
As for the first three-year ECB Ltro, which will expire in a year, Patuelli claims that the Italian banks "will be ready to complete the full repayment without taking away resources from households and businesses".
Finally, a dig at the development policies promoted by the Government, which the number one of the Association defined as “rearguard, not avant-garde. Today we should encourage forms of development, but this has only partially happened with the Stability law”. Patuelli points out, an act has come from the Executive towards the banks which contradicts the development policies included in the Stability law, i.e. "the 8,5% IRES surtax for 2013, a frightening thing for a additional, which produces a handicap to the Italian production cycle. A tax burden that subtracts profitability to be allocated to assets”, precisely in the period in which the ECB preparatory exams for single banking supervision are starting. A measure that "weakens Italy".
