The European Central Bank (ECB) is looking for a way to press on euro zone lenders to deal with their bad loans after a previous proposal was met with strong opposition. Even after a sharp fall in the past two years, euro zone banks still have 721 billion euros of unpaid debt, most of them inherited from the economic crisis and concentrated in countries such as Italy, Greece and Portugal.
The ECB's Single supervision Mechanism plans to introduce rules forcing banks to allocate cash for this credit within a specific time frame were resistant and opposed by bankers, regulators and even within the ECB.
