The conference “The Wealth of the Nation. Financial education and protection of savings”, organized by the Finance and Treasury Commission in the Chapter House of the Senate. It was an event that surprised me a little because, after years of working in the sector, I thought that we would never have passed from an experimental phase to a more structured and systemic one and that it is therefore worth talking about.
The participants (Marino President of the Finance Commission, Marcucci President of the Education Commission, Vegas Consob, Visco BI, Padoan Minister of Finance) illustrated the initiatives carried out within their competence and retraced the road map for the months to come. A roundtable discussion with a dozen representatives of financial business associations followed.
In essence, with the conversion law of decree law 237/2016 in mid-February 2017, legislative provisions concerning financial, insurance and social security education were introduced for the first time ever in our country. It is defined as the process by which people improve their understanding of financial products and develop the skills to identify risks and opportunities in the world of finance.
The Mef and the Miur will have to present the Program for the national strategy by August 22 on the basis of the conclusions of a special committee which will have the task of promoting and planning all the initiatives. The provision of a control room is due to the need to coordinate the many initiatives surveyed in a previous conference in January 2017: about 300 active subjects who make up an extremely fragmented and extemporaneous picture of training in banking and finance.
During this first and important conference, it was reaffirmed that financial education has a high strategic value, promotes the concept of economic citizenship based on responsibility in individual choices and completes the season of reforms on the banking system. In setting the objectives and priorities, our country will have to align with the best international practices and, with a retrospective look at our history, with what Luigi Einaudi wrote in 1921: "The saver must study carefully, with prudence and without greed, the opportunities for employment that arise from time to time" because "it would be a great evil if the stock market crisis frightened savers against all industrial investments".
Financial education arrives late in Italy but is finally welcome and will be able to learn a lot from what happened in the preliminary phase of its existence which lasted almost 10 years. In this period, in fact, the situation of the banks deteriorated significantly and in many areas of the country those closest to savers disappeared: the local banks. In outlining the guidelines of the country's financial education, however, we cannot limit ourselves to just promoting people's financial literacy.
There is a need to restore trust in savers to prevent them from withdrawing their deposits from banks in crisis as is happening in order not to suffer the harmful effects of the bail-in and to encourage the inclusion of vulnerable subjects (single women, families, migrants). Many interested subjects, on the other hand, illustrate their own experiences in an always complacent and positive way and more than Einaudi they bring to mind the cat and the fox who are very hungry for poor Pinocchio's gold sequins.
Since we are not starting from scratch, we also need to know how to read and treasure the reactions of the pupils recorded so far, evaluate and analyze them. This is for the purpose of future working tables which will have to establish high quality standards, on which the effectiveness of financial education depends. In my experience, I have sometimes been amazed by the fact that after a few hours of didactic commitment the participants did not ask questions, a sign of little interest in questions that are part of our daily life or in subjects (what is a mortgage, an account current, etc.) today easily traceable on the internet.
Other times, precisely for the reasons I have mentioned, the questions they asked were worthy of the utmost interest and extremely challenging because they were the sad fallout of banking crises in the lives of individuals and in the broken dreams of families. Many centuries ago from similar life stories Shakespeare drew the unforgettable figure of Shylock in the Merchant of Venice who in the event of non-payment demanded a pound of meat from the guarantor of the loan.
In conclusion, ignoring questions such as how to save on banking services or if savings are safe at a particular bank means believing that financial education is a walk in the park, a hot pannicello. The idea of skeptics would then be strengthened, who see in it the risk of wanting to sell certain financial products to the detriment of others or that it is a modest fig leaf to remedy the mistakes of those who should control, supervisors included.
