Anyone possessing a middle-level culture knows that the asset stability of the banks it is necessary to ensure trust, in addition to technical solvency, that the cash flows of businesses and people can freely circulate in the economic system like blood circulates in the human body, and that depositors' money can feed the credit that supports consumption and investments. Anyone with an average culture also knows that a correct use of money takes place, must take place, according to that basic principle which establishes a relationship as linear as possible between its riskiness and its return. Those who frequent this site certainly do not need to give further explanations. On the other hand, those who have decided there would need it tassa on margini of money intermediation, both for the assumptions from which they were induced, and for the consideration they have shown to have of the very nature of bank funding.
Let's start with the assumptions. They say Melons e Salvini: the rate increase is fault of the ECB, hurts the economy (primarily the cost of home loans) and determines unfair profit margins of the banks because these have not correlatedly increased the remuneration of deposits. Now, the alleged fault of the ECB is to fulfill its statutory mandate to fight inflation; and inflation, in market economies, is fought with exactly one monetary policy aimed at reducing demand by increasing the cost of financing. Then we can discuss the dosage of this maneuver, but its foundation is this. Perhaps Meloni and Salvini have alternatives in mind to control inflation, but they haven't told us.
The tax on extra profits undermines the capital solidity of banks
Let's move on to brokerage. As far as the banks are concerned, these act as a transmission belt to the economic system of the policy implemented by the ECB: if it raises the reference rates, the banks follow by raising the cost of loans thus inducing the desired anti-inflationary effect in the economic system. They should automatically raise the remuneration of deposits? The answer is no. And why should they do it? They don't have to, for at least two reasons. The first is that, operating as any economic entity, they tend to reduce spending, in the case of remuneration collection. They increase this remuneration if they need to increase the collection, but if they don't need it why should they increase it? Meloni and Salvini say: but this way the banks earn more. here is the notorious extra profit: an unquantified extra, but an extra none the less. So? Any economic operator who can use a legitimate opportunity to his advantage does so; it does it in small and big things: the large industrial or financial multinational does it as each of us does. What's wrong? Banks, among other things, have to do it more than others, both because those profits are largely intended to strengthen the assets that guarantee their stability even in the presence of financial market turmoil, and because the remainder is distributed to the shareholders, which to a very large extent are not "paperoni", but foundations that finance health, education, charitable works, cultural initiatives. Do Meloni and Salvini know this?
The tax on banks is likely to be a boomerang
Obviously not. And not knowing it, they started cultivating depositors considering them a potential pool of votes to be acquired. So at least they believe, because the move of this bizarre taxation does not favor those who deposit at all, on the contrary, in the limit it penalizes them. For the same reason that the remuneration of deposits has not increased (lack of competition and inertia of depositors) it is unlikely that it will increase in the near future if only because the banks, without shouting it from the rooftops, will try to somehow recover the greater burden they have placed on him. And then – here is the inertia – if the depositor has kept his liquidity in account, he hasn't been forced to: there is a myriad of possible uses for those who want a return; if he has not considered this choice, it is because he prefers the immediate availability of his money to the income he could derive from it. Government policy, on the other hand, underlies the subversion of the principle mentioned at the beginning, deeming it "right" that a job at zero risk, as the checking accountshould yield a return. And that's not all: there is another latent subversion that the bulimia of populism risks producing: it is that which comes from the "moderate" component of the majority which advocates exemption from this surcharge for small banks. Here it is: more than forty years after the Amato law to obtain the aggregation of the banks, and with everything that has happened in the meantime, we are now favoring the local banks.
The extra tax unmasks the populist face of the political forces
We have mentioned Meloni and Salvini, but fairness wants them to be remembered like almost all the others Political forces, in a perverse competition to see who is more populist, greeted positively, and with equal demonstration of ignorance, this initiative exposing itself to a figure that is not the best when the announced one arrives letter of observations from the ECB, when the not strange hypotheses of unconstitutionality could materialize, and when – you never know – a bit of common sense should reappear.
