With a spread above the 300 basis points, companies and households are more at risk in the real economy of our country. To say it is the CGIA Studies Office which analyzed both the liquidity situation of companies and the weight of government bonds and the number of mortgages for the purchase of the house for our families.
If about half of the Italian companies (2,5 million) have just under 681 billion euros of bank loans (active loans relating to the month of June 2018), on the other hand, only 9,3 per cent of households (equal to 2,4 million) have a mortgage for the purchase of their first home and another 6,1 per cent (equal to 1,6 million households) holds government bonds. On the basis of Bank of Italy data (updated as of 31 December 2017) it is clear that the amount of Bots and CCT / BTPs held by households is 300 billion euros, while the debt for mortgages linked to the purchase of the house amounts to approximately 340 billion euros.
The coordinator of the Paolo Zabeo Studies Office says:
“It is obvious that with the persistence of such a high spread, the entire country system would be at the expense of this, as the cost of public debt, for example, would suffer a significant increase. Excluding banks, in the real economy, on the other hand, the most exposed in absolute terms are entrepreneurs who will find themselves paying more for the money borrowed from banks and, in the future, they will have less credit available, because for credit institutions it will be more difficult to deliver it. The percentage of households exposed, on the other hand, is very low, so any increases in the cost of money and the devaluation of government bonds will involve a fairly limited number of households, even if in the medium term the credit squeeze could decrease the supply of credit and consequently also demand ".
“In recent years - affirms the Secretary Renato Mason - the credit granted to companies has dropped enormously. From 2011 to last June, for example, the contraction was almost 249 billion. It is true that in part this was also due to the decrease in demand and the increase in bad debts generated by the crisis, but the main reasons must be attributed to the application of rules and parameters of credit rating imposed on credit institutions by ECB, by European and Italian legislation that have proved to be out of reality and out of time ".
Without banks - continue by the CGIA - you cannot do economics, especially in Italy. Our country, in fact, is made up almost exclusively of small and micro enterprises traditionally undercapitalized and short of cash. In fact, 98 percent of companies have fewer than 20 employees. Therefore, the role of credit institutions remains central both to give oxygen to the entire system and to create the conditions to forcefully relaunch the economic situation that is slowing down terribly. This is why we hope that credit institutions will return to their job, supporting and taking risks together with the world of companies, especially with small ones.
The CGIA, in fact, reports that in the last few years the incidence of net commissions (costs for holding a current account, ATMs / credit cards, collection / payment services, asset management, brokerage and the placement of securities, etc.) on the net revenues of Italian credit institutions. Now the percentage reached is around the 40 per cent, a level that is not found in any other European country. In other words, an increasingly large part of the turnover of the banks is attributable to pure service activities, to the detriment of the core business: that of credit intermediation.