In 2005, the President of the Bank of Italy blocked the cross-border acquisition of two Italian banks for ?prudential reasons and formal errors?. Following these events, the EU Commission brought actions against Italy for infringement of the principle of the free movement of capital. Although...

The Italian and German banking systems shared similar characteristics early in the 1990s but have evolved in different directions since then: Italy privatized its publicly-owned banks while Germany has maintained a large share of state-owned savings banks. Contemporaneously, banks in both...