Italian banks’ levels of non-performing loans (NPLs) will not block economic recovery in the country, the senior deputy governor of the Bank of Italy has said.

Compared with other European economies, Italy’s banks do have a high level of NPLs, and the Italian economy in turn has a higher dependence on bank finance, Salvatore Rossi told an audience in Washington, DC, on April 21, in a speech published in English today (April 25). But he argued that the picture often painted of Italian banks