“The reasons for the free market still await full recognition in our country. This must alert us every time we reflect on the advisability of public intervention in the facts of the economy”. This was stated by Salvatore Rossi, general manager of the Bank of Italy, in the lectio magistralis entitled "State, market, development", held on the occasion of the Donato Manichella award.
“The economic development is done by investors and companies in the free play of the market – continued Rossi -. The first task of the state is to make that game possible and fluid”.
As for the recovery, according to the director general of Palazzo Koch, Italy's "bancocentrism" is proving to be a brake: in the United States, the banking deleveraging caused by the global crisis "has been partly compensated by a greater reliance of companies on the market. In Italy this compensation has not taken place, if not in a very tenuous form, slowing down the exit from the recession and now slowing down the recovery”.
For Rossi “it is necessary that in Italy the terms 'financial system' and 'banking system' are no longer synonymous. Bank leverage inevitably creates a powerful mechanism for amplifying economic shocks. Regulation can contain this mechanism, not eliminate it”, therefore a model that allows “a balanced coexistence of markets and intermediaries” capable of “making the flow of credit for the real economy more stable” is preferable.
