Importantly, the measure of whether banks are increasing their net lending will be the sum of their respective lending to big businesses, mortgage lending to households, lending to non-bank providers of credit such as leasing and factoring companies and mortgage corporations, and either 10 or five times netloans to small enterprises.
This was double the amount lent to them before the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 and 16.5% of net eurozone loans offered by the central bank.
And, as you would expect, Italian and Spanish banks took about 60% of all the net new loans from the ECB, with Spain's overstretched banks taking marginally more than Italy's.