I had long been advocating the need for measures meant not to alleviate the difficulties of some specific bank but rather designed to reduce the impact of the deep and protracted recession that has hit the Italian economy since the global financial crisis: a solution that had been importantly adopted in other countries, evidently under a different regime and interpretation of the role of state aid rules.
As a consequence, last January the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance has reached an agreement with the European Commission on a government guarantee scheme for senior tranches of securitised bad loans (the so called GACS).