capital enables investors to benefit in full from the returns to successful innovation. banks must understand that there is, here, a long - term benefit for them, too. as margins on traditional intermediation shrink and the need to contain leverage sets limits on loan growth, banks should constantly improve their ability to provide more diversified financial services to firms, especially smes. they can play a key ( and profitable ) role in accompanying firms along a path to a better balanced, more robust and flexible funding structure. progress in this direction would be beneficial both for banks and for their customers. a number of empirical studies have found a strong positive causal link between the availability of capital and investment in innovation. a recent study for italy concludes that the issue of shares increases the probability of a firm ’ s undertaking r & d investment by around one third. venture capitalists and other investors specializing in financing innovative enterprises are undersized in europe by comparison with the us. long - term financing, and equity financing in particular, is hampered by both demand and supply factors. on the demand side, the costs of disclosing the relevant information to external investors are often very high compared to the scale of business ; often small firms ’ problems of asymmetric information are amplified by their family - based management model. on the supply side, access to market financing is hindered by the low propensity of institutional investors to invest in these companies ’ securities. the high risk and low liquidity of smes ’ securities do not fit the preferences of most institutional investors, which often lack the expertise to manage the risks associated with this asset class. designing policies to foster investment in securities issued by smes is a difficult task, and in the past the results have often been disappointing. but the challenge is worth taking up. the bis central bankers ’ speeches commission ’ s march 2013 green paper on long - term financing to support structural economic reform and return to a long - term trend of economic growth in europe specifies a number of proposals that constitute a solid basis for future work. the essential goal is to make small enterprises and the entire economy more resilient vis - a - vis shocks to banks and to enhance the capacity to finance growth and innovation. 6. conclusion small and medium - sized enterprises in europe have been hit hard by the crisis, and in several countries their ability to raise external finance has been and still is constrained. a good many counter - measures have been taken, ranging from monetary policy to the allocation of resources from national

; after the outbreak of the war it was even higher, with a peak of 20 times the level of january 2020, before returning somewhat closer to the previous average in the last few days. this is particularly worrying due to the special role of gas in determining retail prices not only for heating and industrial uses, but also for electricity at large. it is consequently important to assess the effects of europe ’ s energy crisis on consumer prices, also beyond their direct effects on headline inflation. a significant share of the rise in core and food inflation, in fact, is due to higher energy prices ; in particular, we may estimate that, absent the energy shock, headline inflation in february this year would have been 3. 5 percentage points lower, at a level, therefore, only slightly above the ecb ’ s 2 per cent target. the failure of inflation forecasts in 2021 has been repeatedly highlighted : however, indirect effects stemming from the increase in the costs of production – mostly due to unpredictable geopolitical factors that are outside the realm of economics – explain almost entirely the upward surprises recorded on core inflation in the euro area in the second half of the year. the energy shock has also relevant consequences for aggregate demand in energy importing economies, where it translates into a drag on domestic resources. in the euro area, the deterioration of the terms of trade, mostly due to the rise of energy prices, has reduced the purchasing power of domestic incomes ( which includes all sectors of the economy ) by about 1 percentage point in 2021, and is expected to have an even larger impact in 2022. the repercussions of the energy shock are likely to be especially severe for households. in the euro area, should gas and oil prices remain at the exceptionally high levels currently implied by future contracts, the increase in consumer prices would cumulatively curtail their disposable income by around 4 percentage points in 2021 and 2022. these losses are asymmetrically distributed across families, hitting more heavily the less well - off who typically devote a larger portion of their incomes to energy purchases. the second key factor is related to the labour market. in the us the growth of nominal wages ( measured as average hourly earnings ) amounted to more than 4 per cent last summer, nearing 6 per cent in january 2022 ( figure 5 ). in the euro area, instead, the increase in wages ( as measured by negotiated wages, which tend to grow broadly in line with actual earnings, but are much less volatile ) still