You call that a balance sheet expansion?

“Too Low To Resuscitate Optimism” indeed…

From BofAML on the definitely underwhelming, potentially stigmafied TLTRO pickup (our emphasis):

When gathering all the comments made by banks on their participation at today’s operation, we find that the major banks in Spain, Italy and Greece have requested a total of €40bn, i.e., 40% of their Sep+Dec available allowance (Exhibit 1, page 4). After extrapolating this to the whole banking system in each of the three countries and including estimates for Portugal and Ireland, we find that the periphery could have accounted for as much as €61bn, out of the €82.6bn borrowed yesterday.

This leaves an estimate of €21.7bn for the take-up by core banks, representing as little as 9% of their available allowance (Table 1). To derive a more precise estimate of the country breakdown, we have to wait for each national central bank to release the details of their end-of-Sep balance sheet. This should happen starting from early-October (with Italy, Finland and Belgium the first to report).