First: the yields of the 2005-year BTP, on which the spread in relation to the Bund is measured and therefore the state of health of the country as perceived by the financial markets, are now historic lows since XNUMX.
Second: the Italian Stock Exchange has instead been at its highest since June 2011, i.e. since before the financial storm broke out that prompted Silvio Berlusconi to take note of the disastrous failure of his third government and Giorgio Napolitano to replace him with Mario Monti who saved us from bankruptcy .
Third: the Chinese central bank revealed on Thursday that it had purchased 2% of Eni and Enel while BlackRock, the largest financial company in the world, continues its Italian shopping and rises to 5% of Mps where it has already entered into Intesa, in Unicredit, in Ubi, in Generali, in Fiat, in Mediaset, in Telecom, in Atlantia and in quite a few of our other companies.
It is the sign that Italy is currently experiencing a magical moment on international markets and is capable of attracting foreign capital arriving from all sides, from the East as well as the West. Moreover, only the week before the Russians of Rosneft had announced their entry into force in Pirelli, sanctions permitting.
It is too early to claim victory and to celebrate the turning point, but there is no doubt that in all of this Renzi's revolution, promoted with flying colors by President Obama, has its weight and is intriguing the whole world with its evident fury reformist. In the new Italian appeal, the novelty of the Renzi government and above all the fact that the rusty parliamentary machine has finally started and promises to make the institutional reforms it has never done in twenty years count. Here they are if they count.
All this is true, but to think that the Italian novelty is entirely in the hands of the Government would certainly be an understatement. Yesterday, a sensational novelty that was unthinkable in other times was, for example, the unequivocal blow that a usually prudent man like the governor of the Bank of Italy, used to moving with soft steps in the velvety rooms of Via Nazionale, reserved for entrepreneurs and trade unions . Their rigidity - the Governor argued - is a strong obstacle to growth: "ties and snares, understood as legislative, bureaucratic, corporate, business and union rigidities are the main obstacle to the development of our country".
The immediate and furious reaction of entrepreneurs and trade unions, not by chance often united in the preservation of the status quo, is the best demonstration that Ignazio Visco has hit the mark. After all, if Italy has not grown for twenty years or has grown less than its European partners or much less than it had grown not only in the post-war period but even in the last decades of the last century, it cannot always be said that the fault lies of the others.
If in the seventies the leader of the CGIL, Luciano Lama, led the strikes for reforms and in our times Susanna Camusso opposes any reform going so far as to threaten (before a belated second thought) a general strike even against a Government which for the first time it reduces taxes on less well-off workers, it will mean something.
Confindustria talks a lot about competitiveness but then its president has nothing better to offer than to threaten to bring its factories to Switzerland. As for the unions, try talking to them about meritocracy or productivity and they'll tell you it's blasphemy or something like that. Fortunately today there is a prime minister who does not let himself be intimidated by the deaf opposition of the trade unions and Confindustria and by following his path he reveals all his political and social irrelevance.
The Governor's words are on the same wavelength as the new government. Scrapping the old political class was sacrosanct, but there is much more to scrap in this country. Finally we are also witnessing the first blows of the pickaxe to the corporations and the old entrepreneurial and trade union management groups. The match will be long and hard and has not yet been won but finally the country is starting to breathe a different air. And the change seems to transform more every day from chimera into hope.
