Wholesale funding, instead, recorded a further contraction, equal to € billion, offset in part by net recourse to Eurosystem refinancing of € billion. In recent months the improvement in market conditions following the announcement of OMTs enabled the major Italian banks to resume bond issues, including of unsecured bonds.
The amount of wholesale bonds maturing by the end of 2014, when the three-year LTROs expire, exceeds € billion. In part to address the need to constitute a liquidity reserve, in the course of 2012 banks increased their holdings of government securities by around € billion (of which one third with residual maturity of less than one year).