By Giovanni Legorano
MILAN--Several Italian banks failed to start trading on Monday
as fears over a Greek debt default induced many investors to shed
peripheral stocks, including Italian, with banks suffering the
most.
Sales orders on Italian stocks, in particular financial stocks,
piled up before the market opening. At the start, the sales orders
were so numerous that the system couldn't manage to process them,
something that often happens when specific news causes a sell-off
on a stock.
Theoretical prices for Italian banks--the prices at which they
would have started trading--hovered around losses of 8% to 10% at
the beginning of the trading session.
UniCredit SpA and Intesa Sanpaolo managed to start trading some
time after the market opened, but were suspended immediately,
accumulating losses of around 6% compared with Friday's closing
prices.
On Sunday, Italy's banking lobby head Antonio Patuelli dismissed
fears of contagion on Italian lenders, saying the country's banks'
direct exposure to Greece was less than EUR1 billion.
Write to Giovanni Legorano at giovanni.legorano@wsj.com