Banks in Italy and Spain made bids for a large proportion of the funds allocated at the first three-year LTRO (Graph 3, centre panel), while the funding situation of banks in other regions improved indirectly. 2 Banks in Germany, Luxembourg and Finland, for example, did not take much additional funding at the first LTRO. However, some of the allotted funds, perhaps after a number of transactions, ended up as deposits with these banks, boosting the liquidity of their balance sheets. In turn, they significantly increased their Eurosystem deposits (Graph 3, right-hand panel). There was also little change in the.
