Letta has never been against the bad bank. There denial to the Financial Times it arrived in the middle of the day from the Presidency of the Council. Citing a government source, the City newspaper claimed today that Letta would consider the bad bank hypothesis counterproductive for Italy and would be worried about the consequences on the sovereign rating.
"Letta believes that the idea of a bad bank could be counterproductive for Italy, and fears that this will accelerate the process of a further downgrade by the rating agencies in the next month," wrote the FT, attributing the sentence to a government official. It is no coincidence that at the end of this week, on Friday 14th, Valentine's Day, Moody's dreaded updating of the Italy rating arrives. After the opening of the president of Bank of Italy Ignazio Visco from the twentieth Forex congress to a system solution, the debate on the bad bank has become even more lively.
Also because the need for a more than concrete "evaluation" of the matter has been reaffirmed by the new record of non-performing loans crammed into the balance sheets of Italian banks: non-performing loans are still growing in December with an increase of +24,6% over the twelve months against +22,7% in November (which now travel at 156 billion euro). Meanwhile, from Forex Visco recalled that loans to businesses, especially smaller ones, have fallen by 9% in the last two years.
And the asset quality review is no longer just a slogan but a reality that is beginning to be translated into figures. For the director general of ABI Giovanni Sabatini, interviewed by Bloombeerg, the ECB's analysis of Italian banks could reveal shortfalls of between 10-15 billion euro. However, for Sabatini, it is a manageable figure and in line with Bank of Italy estimates. Meanwhile, the new European supervision is sharpening its weapons: “We have to accept that some banks have no future. And we have to let them disappear in an orderly way, without necessarily trying to merge them with other institutions,” said Danielle Nouy, chair of the European banking supervisory board, in an interview with the Financial Times, stressing however that European banks are in one better health than investors think.
In Italy the debate on the bad bank, which began some time ago, has become more than pressing in these days. On the one hand there are the various initiatives in no particular order that the individual institutions have put in the pipeline (the internal vehicle of Intesa, the Unicredit and Kkr project, and the Mediobanca dossier for other medium-large institutions), on the other hand the debate on the opportunity or not on a solution that could be systemic. Road that on the one hand poses the problem of finding the resources (and Italy doesn't have any) and on the other invokes the solution adopted by Spain, which went through Community aid (with all that this entails).
In recent days, in an interview with FIRSTonline, Adriano Bianchi, Managing Director of Alvarez & Marsal Italia, the Italian division of the American consultancy company which is working on the dossier opened by Unicredit (with Kkr), noted that "to assume that proceed in random order seems unrealistic" but that "Speaking of system operations, however, should not mean guaranteeing the survival of all the subjects involved (both on the creditor side and on that of the debtors) and this, in Italy (the country of Efim , of state-owned companies in liquidation for over 30 years.), is not so obvious”. And consumer associations have already sounded the alarm about the risk that billionaire suffering will be placed on the shoulders of taxpayers and savers after Visco's words on Forex.
Visco did not rule out "more ambitious interventions" than those in the pipeline so far, private or private-public, in compliance with European standards but did not explain which more ambitious interventions he was referring to. Even the bankers had their say. In recent days, the CEO of Bnl-Bnp Paribas, Fabio Gallia, noted that to solve the problem of non-performing loans "system operations, such as the idea of the bad bank, are not necessarily needed".
For Pierfrancesco Saviotti, managing director of Banco Popolare, the national bad bank "perhaps it is the solution". Saviotti said he was "amazed" in a positive sense by Governor Visco's words on the "most ambitious" project on the management of non-performing loans. “This passage struck me most of all – Saviotti said – and raises the question: is a bad bank manageable at a national level? Let's see, we have to understand. If so, it would perhaps be the solution”. For his part Federico Ghizzoni, CEO of UniCredit, points out that a bad bank could be "more useful" for medium-sized banks and not for banks like Unicredit which "can and must solve its problems by itself". "Unless we are offered something really interesting, we will continue on our way", he specified, explaining that he does not believe that the governor of Bank of Italy Ignazio Visco had in mind a public intervention as much as a cooperation between banks.
