(Finance) – It’s about time credit crunch: in the latest year in which data is available (August 2023 compared to the same month in 2022), the jobs banking you live to Italian businesses decreased by 7.7 percent. In absolute terms the contraction was equal to 55.8 billion euros. The reduction for businesses with fewer than 20 employees was 8.7 percent; those of larger dimensions, however, have undergone a slightly more limited “cut”, namely 7.5 percent. Please note that companies with fewer than 20 employees make up approximately 98 percent of the total companies in Italy. The SOS is launched byCGIA research office.
According to the CGIA, the causes of this credit crunch are at least three and very closely linked to each other: the increase in interest rates imposed by ECB this last year has made it very expensive to go into debt. Therefore, many companies, especially medium/large sized ones, have preferred to resort to forms of self-financing; the decline of volumes credit is also related to the slowdown in national GDP which caused a decline in the demand for loans; banks have less liquid assets available both because they have to return the Tltro funds to the ECB (another 174 billion euros by September 2024), and because collection has decreased.
The combination of these phenomena has pushed many institutions to “sacrifice” the most complicated credit: that is, that to be provided to very small businesses which, generally, presents costs Of investigation relatively higher and very laborious administrative management.
Without liquidity a company, especially a small one, cannot make investments, is often forced to delay payments to suppliers and in the most critical cases begins to fail to regularly pay salaries to its employees. To prevent all this from causing a definitive closure of the business or, even worse, that the owners slip into the net spread by the organizations criminals who, in these moments, are always available to lend money to companies in difficulty, it is necessary for the Government to intervene immediately, refinancing the Guarantee fund for SMEs which had been strengthened during the Covid period. Thanks to this revisited tool, many credit institutions would find themselves in a position to lend money without running any risk of seeing their debts increase dramatically. insolvencies. We remind you that between March 2020 and June 2022, to support SMEs affected by the pandemic emergency, the Guarantee Fund guaranteed over 256.8 billion euros in loans.
Among companies with fewer than 20 employees, in the last year (August 2023 compared to the same month of 2022), the reduction in credit amounted to 10.6 billion euros (-8.7 percent). Currently, the total amount of bank loans provided to very small businesses is 111 billion euros. The most important regional contraction concerned the realities of Marche (-11.1 percent equal to an absolute value of -421 million euros). Followed by those of Veneto (-10.2 percent equal to -1.3 billion euros), of Friuli Venezia Giulia (-10.1 percent which corresponds to -265 million euros) and of Lombardy (still -10.1 percent equal to -2.3 billion euros). The least “critical” situations occurred in Sardinia (-6.7 percent equal to -178 million euros), in Trentino Alto Adige (-6.4 percent equal to -515 million euros) and, in particular, in Lazio (-6.3 percent equal to -481 million euros).