Efficient management of the country’s savings is a competitive challenge and an opportunity for growth, both of the economy as a whole and of the financial industry. In Italy as elsewhere the composition of households’ financial wealth has shifted in the last few years, as a result of more active, diversified and efficient portfolio management.
And that was the death blow for something that was already severely wounded: trust. Banks around the world started worrying about their exposures to what were known as subprime mortgage loans. Through new financial instruments, the risks from these loans had been spread across the banking sector – in very opaque ways.