Has the tax placed on banks' excess earnings prompted an increase in lending? The answer is no: facts plainly demonstrate that since the government announced the budgetary intervention at the beginning of August, the trend of bank loans to consumers and enterprises has been negative, consistent with the preceding months. From the end of July to November, credit institutions' total loans to the private sector fell by more than 12 billion euros, for an overall decrease of 0.96%, and the stock fell from 1,310 billion to nearly 1,298 billion: loans to businesses fell by 10 billion (-1.58%), and loans to households fell by 2.5 billion (-0.37%). This is what the Unimpresa Study Center reports, after conducting a fact-checking operation on what Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni stated during a television appearance last Monday evening, claiming that "credit has increased" since August. On the other hand, the situation is different if we look at the trend in the remuneration of customer deposits: in the same period, the rates that banks pay to customers have risen to more than 50%: in particular, there is a positive acceleration in the remuneration of companies' current accounts, which rose from 0.62% in July to 0.94% in November, representing a more than 50% increase.
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