Another aspect that is sometimes also ignored refers to the fact that the banks’ portfolio of domestic public debt is not very high in percentage of total bank assets and even now is generally below the historical average.
[Slide 7: Public debt held by domestic banks in % of Total Assets] The points I just made seem to run counter to the idea that the macro imbalances in peripheral countries was mostly driven by the public sector. As seen in the charts, with the possible exception of Greece, that seems not to have been the case.