It is the State that is the primary beneficiary of the record profits recorded by banks in 2023. This was said by the President of the Bankers Association, Antonio Patuelli, stressing that the resources obtained by banks with the sharp increase in profits in 2023 will be spent "in three directions. The first in taxes, in the sense that dividends will have a sum of taxes reaching almost 60 percent, so the first to benefit from bank profits will be the state. Then the shareholders will benefit, and the banks will have to benefit with robust provisions". Speaking about banking desertification and the ever-increasing number of municipalities without branches, Patuelli explained that "there are parts of the country that have been seeing their population decline for decades and even bank branches cannot hold up in their income statements". As for the ECB's next moves, "we have to wait for the next meeting to see if it will cap the official rate or if there will be a signal to that effect anyway since mid-November, markets have been anticipating rate cuts for customers," he concluded.
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