The demand for money and the "disintermediation" of banks.

Over the past two years the expansion of banking intermediation in Italy has come to a halt. The reduction in the share of financial wealth of the economy represented by bank deposits and in the ratio of bank deposits to gross domestic product has sparked a lively debate, particularly in the banking system. However, thus far there have been no systematic analyses of the causes of this phenomenon. The present work examines the recent banking "disintermediation" using the analytical tools of monetary economics. An econometric analysis of a demand function for bank deposits offers an "explanation" of their decreased growth rate and allows to quantify the causal factors. Moreover, it is possible to simulate this model to derive implications in terms of expected future trends.