Moreover, a survey on euro-area countries recently conducted by the Bank of Italy indicates a surprisingly poor state of affairs concerning statistics on residential LTVs: information is often of poor quality or even missing altogether. Definitions are barely harmonized across countries. Clearly, substantial progress is still necessary in this field.
While banks are markedly better capitalized today than in the wake of the financial crisis, their rather low profitability might hamper their resilience in the future. To be honest, these two challenges imply a lot of work ahead, not only for euro-area banks, but also for their supervisors.