The Monti–Giavazzi derby/2 - It's not enough to say transfer market

The clash between the two Bocconi professors continues on the pages of FIRSTonline - The two economists have a common characteristic: they see the market as the main way to overcome the current stagnation - But today's market is not that of the past and the 2008 crisis was caused precisely by the inability of the markets to regulate themselves

Even if with different settings or shades, Mario Monti and Francesco Giavazzi consider a more solid and widespread "market culture" the best way to overcome the current crisis. It is believed that few serious scholars can, or want to, criticize the positive function of the Market, especially if this is compared with the model of planned economies of real socialism (abandoned with the fall of the wall) or economies with high state intervention. Nor does the writer intend to criticize the model of the market economy. However, we cannot forget that the deep crisis that erupted in 2008 was caused precisely by the ineffectiveness of the "market self-regulation" and by the propensity of financial capital to evade tax controls and systems moving quickly (as Giavazzi would like) in a global context in search of easy and immediate speculative gains.

The mobility of capitalism it allows profits to emerge in countries with lower taxation, to make investments in countries that guarantee incentives or in which there is a low cost of labor due to the lack of the most basic personal protections, to attack currencies and cause enormous turbulence financial institutions that even question the forms of representative democracy or democracy tout court.

My already very high esteem for President Monti has grown enormously since he accepted the difficult responsibility of government, which exposed him not only to the Bocconi derbies, to fibrillation between parties and to union conflicts, but also to some heavy personal attacks by opposition parties and the Internet.

Therefore, I would not like to be accused by him of superficiality and inaccuracies if I note that Marchionne's decision to invest in Serbia, which he defended before the Milan assembly of Confindustria, appears to have been determined by state subsidies and that the Chrysler operation was possible following significant support from the US government in the darkest phase of the crisis in the automotive sector.

This allows me to introduce an argument often forgotten by economic commentators and analysts. The market of the era of globalization is not even distantly related to those presented in the "Sacred Texts" of Economics on which millions of students all over the world sweat, often having to deal with complex mathematical formulas built on the abstract hypothesis of rationality which underlies theories formulated at the end of the 800th and beginning of the 900th centuries. Nor is it a distant relative of the social market economy models or of the markets in which the symmetry of the information prevails between the various subjects who operate in them. It is not distantly related to current markets, in which it is not efficient companies that prevail but those that obtain the protection of political powers, that evade taxes and resort to corruption to win public tenders and contracts or to supply other private companies.

Today's markets financial, raw materials, many consumer goods and services, they are dominated by a few dozen (or a few hundred) of large global groups, by companies controlled directly or subject to strong regulation by states (see China, oil countries, Russia where the oligarchs of the economy, formally private, can live only if they do not oppose political power), by investment funds and sovereign wealth funds capable of moving billions of dollars and euros and scuppering entire economies.

The effect of this type of market is the strong concentration of wealth: data according to which: 1% of the US population owns more than 50% of the wealth – some statistics say 66%; that 10% of the richest part of the Italian population holds 45% and more of the wealth; that in India, compared to a few hundred or a few thousand super-rich and 100-150 million well-off, there remain almost a billion people in conditions of almost absolute poverty; that even in China, after a twenty-year economic boom, faced with a few thousand super-rich, a few million well-off with medium-high income, 200-250 million people who can afford superfluous consumption (paying the high price of backbreaking work and harmful) is about a billion people who have little more than the bowl of rice or piece of chicken that was Mao's goal. Not to mention the 2,7 billion people living on less than $2 a day and over 1,5 billion people without access to clean water. Even the German model of social market economy seems to be very supportive internally and when it comes to defending national interests, but little solidarity with its European partners when they ask for growth policies.

Without thinking deeply and creatively about these aspects, the market may not be the solution, but continue to be part of the problem.