Basel II assigned a much lower weight to purely financial activities than to lending, in which Italian banks are specialized. This is why Italian banks, when subject to international comparison on the basis of current data, appear better capitalized in terms of financial leverage than risk-weighted assets.
The decision to treat financial assets more favourably was based on the implicit assumption that  2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  the markets in which they were traded would always be liquid. The crisis dramatically demonstrated the fragility of this assumption and the need to rebalance the system of weights.