Italy on the Brink

Italy on the Brink via Mises

As several articles over the past few days have indicated (here, here, here and here), Italy is on the brink of a full-blown banking crisis. Bad debts, or “non-performing loans,” held by the banking sector total  360 billion euros, which is a remarkable 17 percent of all the outstanding bank loans in Italy and equal to about one-fifth of the annual Italian GDP. It is also many times the level of bad debt held by Italian banks at the peak of the financial crisis in 2008. Since the beginning of 2016, prices of bank stocks ihave decreased by more than 50%. In the case...