Banks, in Northern Europe the records of derivatives – the Journal

D when the banks are back on the European financial emergency center, it grew the duel between suffering and derivatives. They are more serious the first of which are filled with Italian banks, or the second, very present in the budgets of the North European institutions? The Office of Cgia studies, which analyzed the latest data provided by the Authority European Banking Authority (EBA) for March 2016, which show that the Finnish banks, the UK and Germany have more than 20% of their belly active derivatives; in Italy this figure stands at just 5.3%, or less than half the EU average (12.9%). “There are products without risks and with the advent of the new millennium – says the coordinator of the Office of Studies Cgia Mestre – European banks have experienced, to varying degrees, the adoption of these instruments is to manage the risks with the intention of generating extra-credit revenues. ” Actually derivatives represent a risk and how, so that between March 2015 and March 2016, the incidence On the assets of European banks fell from 15.2% to 12.9%.

The surveys provided by the European banking (Eba) concern a sample of lenders: more than 150 European banks, at least 3 for each country, with a growing number depending on the size of States (eg Italy and Germany data refer respectively to 15 and 21 major banking institutions that represent a large share of their respective banking systems). On the basis of the total assets of Italian banks (amounting to 2.323 billion) and German ones (4.060) can be estimated as the amount of derivatives in chief at Italian banks is at least 123 billion while those in Germany at least 813 billion.

the Italian non-performing loans, as noted, are more than 350 billion, of which 200 are gross NPLs, written down to about 80 billion. It must be said then that anyway, confontare npl (non performing loans) and derivatives such as pears and apples: the first are uncollectible or of difficult recovery; the latter are not losses, but risks: each corresponds derived an underlying value that depending on the structure of the derivative itself will generate a gain or a loss. By the same token, even the suffering are not fiscal buci. On the contrary: in the Italian case, as is known, the net non-performing and more generally the npl are secured by real assets, whose market value, after impairment, is at least equal to that to which the credits are entered in the budget. So the problem is not the suffering, but the time required to recover collateral. In other words, the problem is not in banks’ balance sheets, but in the Italian justice. In this sense, if you will, suffering and derivatives are similar: both are not holes in the budget, but to solve problems and risks to manage.

Returning to the study of derivatives, and looking at the asset composition German and Italian banks, it is significant to see how the high proportion of derivatives in the head at the first went to the detriment of the credit. If, in fact, the incidence of German bank lending is still more than half of the total budget (56.2%) is quite clear that this figure is much lower than the average for the European Union (64.3%) and Italy (67.8 percent).