There is an impertinent joke circulating on the financial markets in these hours. Here it is: why didn't the rating agencies take advantage of the Sanremo Festival to downgrade Italy once again? Answer: just because they haven't seen it.
Fortunately, the markets are taking advantage of SuperMario Draghi's advice who a couple of weeks ago, faced with the usual out-of-time drumming by Moody's, S&P and Fitch, seraphically concluded that we had to get over it and learn to live ignoring the ratings. This is what the stock exchanges are doing and it is perhaps the worst of the punishments that the rating agencies are receiving. If one does not realize the importance of the reclamation work that the Monti government is doing for Italy and claims to issue ratings, he can only do one thing: change jobs.
And yet, if they were less intellectually lazy, the rating agencies would have before their eyes a school case for censoring our country, this time with some reason: it would be enough to pay attention to the always impressive manifestations of self-harm and the subculture that Italy it expresses towards the few large groups that it has left. It was and is like this for Fiat without anyone wondering how it is possible that Sergio Marchionne is so acclaimed by Obama and by the United States and is considered a misdemeanor in Italy despite having taken over a technically bankrupt group and transformed, with Chrysler, into a global player. But this was also the case with our two major banks (Intesa and Unicredit), in part with Eni, Enel and Telecom, and now with Generali.
As we know, Leo does not like the limelight and has a management style that is a mix of balance and sobriety, of nobility and solitude. In fact, it didn't take long to reject a body completely foreign to his culture and his understatement like that of Cesare Geronzi who had nothing to do with prudent foresight, with a solidly international imprint and with a slightly Hapsburg severity of the winged lion. It is not the first time that an international giant such as Generali has been touched by an earthquake such as the one that is shaking Italian finance and its sanctuaries in recent days with the Fonsai case. And certainly the fact that two shareholders of the Leone like Mediobanca and Palladio are competing on the market for the recapitalization and the conquest of the second insurance center cannot leave the top management in Trieste indifferent.
However, to think that the top management of Generali is so naïve and so imprudent as to take the field and to assert their personal relationships (which concern both Piazzetta Cuccia and Palladio) to the advantage of one against the other is only the result of a cultural provincialism that he is used to looking at the vicissitudes of big finance through the keyhole. But it is also a legacy of other times, when the majority shareholder (who then as now was and is Mediobanca) thought she could dispose of his stake in Trieste as a simple pawn in his empire. Today Cuccia is gone and that parlor belongs to another era and another capitalism. But who does not remember the pride and pride of a legendary character in the history of the Lion like Alfonso Desiata with whom he grew up, both professionally and in family circles, the current number one of Generali, Giovanni Perissinotto? Yesterday's shots of pride and independence are equal to the great sense of responsibility but also to the vexed annoyance with which the Lion today looks at what is happening around the Ligresti group. So far the threats and intimidation that have rained down from unsuspected shores have not been enough to disturb the traditional ataraxia of the Trieste multinational.
But throwing the jacket at Generali in a fratricidal war for a rotten group like Fonsai would be the last slight that could be done not only against the Lion of Trieste but also against Italy which would have to cultivate the few great jewels that still has. But this, unfortunately, is not a country for big players. Even if time has always proved Trieste's foresight right.
