Onexposure of Italian banks towards theGreek economy there are at least two good news and one bad news. Let's start with the good news.
The first good news is that theexposure of Italian credit institutions towards theGreek economy it's passed from 6 billion euros in 2010 to 800 million euros in the third quarter of 2014. This was revealed by an analysis by the European think tank Bruegel which included both loans to the private sector and purchases of government bonds in the study. The second piece of good news for Italian banks comes from the comparison of the exposure to the Greek economy of German, French and Dutch banks. In fact, German banks are exposed for 10,2 billion euros, French ones for 1,3 billion and Dutch credit institutions for 923 million euros.
The good news ends there and is partly overshadowed by the bad news of Bruegel's analysis explaining how almost half of the Italian exposure towards the Greek economy is linked to government bonds.
In fact, the credit institutions of our peninsula are the ones most exposed to the Greek public debt. Greek government bonds worth more than 385 million euro they are in the pockets of Italian banks which would be the only ones in the euro area to have increased this exposure between 2012 and 2014. The concern derives from the fact that yesterday the spread between the 10-year German and Greek bunds exceeded 1000 basis points and that the yield on 2- or 3-year bonds stood at 20%. Around the corner are the fears of a Greek inability to repay the debt and the new hypothesis of Greece's exit from the euro which returned to the stock markets yesterday.
