While Italian banks have demonstrated good resilience overall, thanks to their sound fundamentals at the outset of the financial crisis, the sovereign crisis and two long and deep recessions have put their balance sheets under severe stress. NPLs have been rising steadily since 2008, depressing profitability and raising concerns over provisioning among analysts and market operators.
And even though I have set out the reasons why we need to quickly enhance comparability among European banks, we take these concerns seriously. Indeed, we have taken decisive action to address these risks, and we are confident that this will improve the outlook for the Italian credit market.