FUNZIONI, RISCHI E REGOLAMENTAZIONE DELL’ATTIVITÀ BANCARIA

Functions traditionally provided by banks are public utilities: they produce credit, liquidity and money on a large scale. Being central to the financing of the real economy and the functioning of the payments system, they are an essential financial infrastructure of the market economy. Their financial structure is inherently unstable and their equilibrium fragile since the value of their debts reflects the quality of their assets. Their equilibrium depends on owned capital adequacy (absorbing capacity of asset devaluations) and on liquidity reserve adequacy (payment capacity of outstanding obligations). Owned capital and liquidity are mere fractions respectively of risky assets and exigible debt). Adequacy is never absolute and it depends also on market conditions (borrowers’ risks, creditors’ propensities and exchangeable liquidity) and bankers’ propensity to risk. In fact bankers are entrepreneurs, behave with a sight to profit within a competitive context, and hence try to increase capital and liquidity (costly factors) productivity, exploiting leverage on them. Bankers choices and actions reflect incentives which take financial stability as a mere condition of sustainable equilibrium. Hence the superior need of a banking regulation aimed at stability, now defined prudential, inherently congruent with the assumption that bankers’ conducts might deflect from sound and safe management practices and policies. Up to now bank crises have been resolved by public bail-outs. The recent political choice to insulate public finances from banking failures by promptly bailingin shareholders and creditors of distressed banks should resolve the intrinsic agencymoral hazard problem and prevent that bankers exploit implicit public guarantees and subsidies. However the solution – based also on a substantial strengthening of bank capitalization and liquidity – could substantially hinder factors’ productivity and banks’ profitability, hence fundamentally the efficiency and functionality of the aforementioned financial infrastructure. The problem of a wise, correct and contingent equilibrium among banks, markets, regulation and public intervention is still as open as ever. Moreover, the deepening interconnectedness among banks, including other financial intermediaries, reveals that risk has become systemic, structural and endemic, which is a matter of further concern.