The stock market week begins with a shower of orders on Popular stocks, which are struggling to make up the price. At the opening of the session in Piazza Affari Bper, Bpm, Banco Popolare and Ubi all gained between 6 and 8,4%, after having touched, in the case of Banco Pop, even +10% in the very first minutes of trading.
The market's enthusiasm has been unleashed by the reform of cooperative banks announced by Matteo Renzi, a measure that could relaunch the hypothesis of a merger between Bpm and Bper, the choices of Banco Popolare (+4,3% on Friday) and the role of aggregator of Ubi. But above all, eliminating the controversial per capita vote for the major Popolari (One person, one vote, regardless of the size of the shares held), would considerably increase the contestability of the main Popolari.
All these novelties will be contained in the investment decree, the so-called "Investment compact", which is expected in the Council of Ministers tomorrow: the premier has for now only hinted that it will be a question of mrationalization and simplification measures.
In particular, as mentioned, this intervention, advocated by the Bank of Italy and expected for decades, would open up scenarios of mergers and consolidation of the sector which have been frozen until now pending the stress tests and the launch of the single ECB supervision and the presentation of the self-reform of the sector. Precisely for this reason there is tension on the issue, even within the government majority itself: a part of the Democratic Party would in fact prefer a parliamentary confrontation in February, after the election of the President of the Republic.
However, it is a highly flammable material: the first attempt to rationalize the Popolari by canceling the per capita vote at least for the listed ones dates back to 1198 with the first draft of the Tuf elaborated by the then director general of the Treasury Mario Draghi who in the definitive version of the new Text the only one in finance was forced to eliminate the norm. In recent years there have been numerous attempts by Governments and Parliament to reform the cooperatives but a very aggressive transversal lobby has always nipped in the bud any hope of modernization and downsizing of the per capita vote at least for the largest cooperative banks listed on the Stock Exchange. This is why, beyond the foreseeable initial enthusiasm of the Stock Exchange, the bet remains open and extremely uncertain and it will take time to see the real results. However, the fact that Matteo Renzi courageously wants to play this game too is a novelty that testifies that finally something is moving in Italy also for finance.
In addition to the probable Bper-Bpm merger, the one between Banco Popolare and Veneto Banca would also arrive on the scene, but candidates for the merger are also Popolare Vicenza and Banca Etruria, the latter, however, grappling with a complex restructuring plan due to the high impaired loans which, according to Fiba Cisl, provides for 410 redundancies, or 1 out of 4 employees of the group precisely to make it more attractive to mergers. Furthermore, it is not excluded that the two most "sick" spas in the banking system, Carige and Mps, will also be involved in the restructuring.
Speaking of Mps, in the meantime it will take two weeks to have a definitive outcome of the Sienese institute's negotiations with the top management of the European Supervisory Authority led by Danielle Nouy. While waiting for Mario Draghi, the banks are therefore living in a climate of growing fibrillation. There was also Friday the alarm in the wake of rumors that two Greek banks were in trouble. However, the euphoria from Quantitative easing canceled the worries and the banks in Piazza Affari achieved substantial increases: Unicredit rose by 2,8%, Intesa +1,4%. Today Unicredit opens further up (+1,5%), while Intesa is essentially flat at 2,504 euros.
