2023-08-08 11:39:04
The low trading volume in these days of August and the caution awaiting new macroeconomic references may mean that any unexpected information is enough to accelerate investor movements. And that is what is happening this Tuesday with the bank, which is leading the market falls after learning that Italy has imposed a 40% tax on the extraordinary profits of the country’s entities in 2023.
Specifically, it will apply when a bank’s interest margin exceeds a certain percentage, provided that it does not exceed 25% of its assets.
The market’s reaction to the decision of Giorgia Meloni’s government has not been long in coming and the new tax weighed down the price of the sector on Tuesday at the opening of the Milan Stock Exchange, with a fall in the titles of Bper (-7.39% ), Banco Bpm (-6.73%), Intesa Sanpaolo (-7.17%), Unicredit (-5.68%), Mps (-6.75%)%, Mediolanum (-3.04%) and Middle bank (1.64%).
The contagion effect reached the rest of the European markets and, in the Spanish case, Santander led the falls of the Ibex-35 with a decrease of 2.3%, followed by BBVA and Unicaja, which lost 2% and 1.5%. mid session.
In line with what other countries such as Spain have done, the collection of the new tax, which was included without prior notice in an omnibus decree approved in a Council of Ministers held late on Monday, will be used to help those with mortgages and to reduce the tax burden of citizens.
The Vice President of the Transalpine Government, Mateo Salvini, defended on Tuesday at a press conference the introduction of the extraordinary tax, ensuring the rise in interest rates by the European Central Bank (ECB) has led to an increase in the cost of money for families and companies “that has not been transferred with the same speed to consumers who have deposits in checking accounts.”
An argument that is also used from other countries where banks are taking longer than usual to apply the rate hike to their customers’ savings, as is the case in Spain, where even the Ministry of Economy has commissioned the National Commission for Markets and Competition (CNMC) an analysis to determine why entities are not improving the remuneration of deposits at the same rate that they are raising the price of their loans.
“Apparently, the executive intends to raise up to 2,000 million euros in this way,” says Rafael Alonso, an analyst at Bankinter. “The details are still unknown, but it seems that the tax would be limited in scope to the results of 2023,” he adds.
In any case, he does consider that it is bad news for listed bank companies, since this collection objective represents around 14% of the sector’s profits in 2022 and 10.5% of the accumulated net profit estimated for 2023. «It is a significant increase in taxation that reduces the generation of capital in the sector and generates regulatory uncertainty”, the experts warn.
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