New mortgage loans at fixed rates amounted to € billion in 2008 or 64 per cent of the total granted to households, compared with € billion (51 per cent) in 2007. The wide gap between Italy and the euro-area average in the cost of new fixed-rate mortgages (one percentage point in June 2007) has now narrowed to nearly nil.
In the last few months the share of new fixed-rate loans has fallen slightly, though remaining higher than in the past (55 per cent in January).