Last week, the vice president of the ECB, Luis de Guindos, said that more attention must be paid to the crises of small and medium-sized banks. Yesterday, the president of the supervisory board of the ECB, Andrea Enria, warned that some banks have no long-term prospects. Putting together two observations enunciated at such a short distance, it can be deduced that in the Eurotower there is growing concern about the resilience of the European credit system, indeed of the systems of the various countries because in the Eurozone a single capital market does not yet exist (and this is part of the problem along with the wave of NPLs that the pandemic is generating). For Enria it would be important to implement the single deposit guarantee, so that citizens of the various EU states can enjoy the same level of savings protection, and it would be necessary to act promptly to avoid an accumulation of NPLs in banks, perhaps with a bad bank (although Enria did not talk about this yesterday, he did so on several other occasions).
While waiting for these instruments to emerge, the only way to avoid new banking crises is represented by mergers and acquisitions.. The new warning coming from the ECB should sound like an encouragement for the Italian banking system to deal with its unsolved cases, such as Mps and Carige, as well as to act with a view to aggregations for preventive purposes. It has now been over a year since Intesa Sanpaolo launched the takeover bid on Ubi without any other operations having been started, despite the great talk that is made every day about banking risk with the effect of enlivening the securities on the Stock Exchange of the institutions involved in the various hypotheses of union: Unicredit, Banco Bpm and Bper, above all. The most imaginative see a marriage between Gae Aulenti’s bank and Mediobanca. Anything can happen, but it must happen by 2021 to take advantage of the tax bonus made available by the government for merging banks. Starting with Mps which is controlled by the Treasury.