Italians continue to choose brick. Even if house prices continue to fall (-0,6% in the fourth quarter of 2018, the only drop in the whole EU according to Eurostat), savers who prefer finance to the economy tangible they remain a minority. And the disproportion is still very large: household assets consist of 6.300 billion euros in real assets, mostly immovable, while financial wealth does not exceed 4.400 billion. Almost a third less.
The data refer to the end of 2017 and are contained in a Occasional papers of the Bank of Italy entitled "Household wealth at a glance: Italy and the international comparison”. According to the study – signed by Diego Caprara, Riccardo De Bonis and Luigi Infante – the gross real wealth of Italians is equal to 5,5 times their disposable income, with housing accounting for 4,6 times. Financial wealth, on the other hand, stops at 3,8 times. In other words, even without considering the rest of the non-financial assets, houses and lands clearly beat securities, deposits and funds.
To tell the truth, this gap has always existed. In the past, indeed, it was much greater. As the Bank of Italy graph demonstrates, the difference between real and financial wealth was highest in the XNUMXs and progressively narrowed in the second half of the last century. The financial component exceeded the real one only for a short time in the second half of the nineties, during the stock market boom (and the bubble). new economy.
From that moment, "financial assets grew until 2006 - write the Via Nazionale analysts - then the global financial crisis and that of sovereign debt interrupted their growth and the recovery after 2011 has not yet brought them back to pre- -crisis of 2006”. On the contrary, "the ratio between real wealth and disposable income grew until 2012, and then decreased due to the fall in house prices".
So far the scenario in Italy. But how is the situation in other countries? Bankitalia paints a fragmented picture: as with us, also in France and Spain real wealth exceeds financial wealth, while the opposite occurs in Use, Canada, Japan e Germany. For different reasons.
The two North American countries are weighed down by "the strong development of the financial markets - continues the study - and the very low population density, which depresses the prices of land and housing outside the large urban centres". In Germany, on the other hand, other factors are decisive: "The low percentage of the population that lives in owned homes, the diffusion of social housing and a more moderate trend in house prices, also due to the absence of the credit boom for families which had invested the other European countries until the global financial crisis”.
If we just look the relationship between financial assets and disposable income,Italy is equal to France (3,8 times) and exceeds both Spain is, surprisingly, the Germany (3 times), but stays away from United States, Japan, UK e Canada (more than 5 times).
Finally, a look at the debts. In Italy household liabilities soared from 36% of disposable income in 1995 to 80% in 2017, but still remain the lowest. The Germany slightly surpasses us, while France, Spain, United States e Japan lie between 100 and 120%. It's even worse ai British citizens (150%) and ai Canadians (170%).
