MFI lending to the private sector

Credit from monetary financial institutions (MFIs) to the private sector – i.e. euro area households, non-financial corporations (NFCs) and financial corporations – is one of the key indicators used to inform monetary policy. This information is derived from the balance sheets of MFIs.

Several factors make the direct interpretation of these data difficult, in particular:

• Securitisation and other loan transfers can change the outstanding amounts of loans on bank balance sheets, even though they do not affect the actual financing that has been provided to the real economy.
• Cash pooling, which is offered by banks to help corporate groups manage their liquidity more effectively, may also disguise real trends in credit.

To account for these factors, headline indicators on lending are adjusted for securitisation and other loan transfers and for notional cash pooling.

Loans to households are broken down by loan purpose (i.e. house purchase, consumer credit and other lending). Loans to NFCs are broken down by original maturity and, on an estimated basis, by principal economic activity of the borrower according to the statistical classification of economic activities in the European Community (NACE). 

Latest developments

Resources

• Summary tables and interactive charts
• All available time series
• Dataset description & metadata
• Dataset structure & code list

Overview charts

This section includes a set of charts for quick reference and country comparison covering loans from MFIs to euro area households and NFCs.