The Conference dedicated to the fifteen years of life of the Consolidated Law on Finance (TUF), which took place these days at the Bocconi University in Milan, calls for an assessment of the season of reforms in the Italian financial market that began in the early XNUMXs and ideally ended by the company law reform. Filippo Cavazzuti's speech, published Thursday on the daily site of first online, has already offered an interesting and shareable key to understanding: the multiplication of pages of the TUF, implemented in recent years, is the result of the transformation of a regulatory instrument, created to establish a regulation based on principles also in Italy, in the umpteenth national example of legislative and regulatory redundancy lacking substantive enforcement (i.e. lacking an effective enforcement). In my opinion, this transformation represents a turning point: it sanctions the defeat of one of the most promising attempts to overcome the relational nature and the consequent governance of Italian capitalism, so as to dry up the pervasive positions of income.
Thanks to the pressure of European directives, between the end of the eighties and the beginning of the nineties, Italy began to introduce those legal and regulatory innovations in the financial field that would mark the end of a banking sector characterized by the segmentation of the national market , related monopoly rents, distortive regulation and public ownership. The desired outcome was that, by interacting with the privatization processes of state-owned companies and the liberalization of the related markets, the ownership and organizational renewal of banking groups would lead to the expansion of shareholdings and the dimensional strengthening of Italian non-financial companies and in the connected emergence of new non-bank financial intermediaries and institutional investors. The growth of the stock market, the explosion of investment funds and the launch of pension funds seemed to go in the desired direction. However, the conviction of the reformers was that, despite the regulatory innovations already introduced, in Italy the financial institutions and rules remained too rooted in the old relational and protected model to support and consolidate this direction of change over time. The original design of the TUF consisted precisely in modifying the basic logic of the regulatory interventions.
To obtain this result, the more or less conscious choice was to proceed with a delicate and complex grafting of Anglo-Saxon institutions into the different Italian institutional body. The idea was certainly not to carry out a massive replacement of the Italian rules with British or American principles, but to gradually modify the worst aspects of our path dependency. This was supposed to make the external environment more efficient, stimulate the growth of successful small and medium-sized enterprises, strengthen our bloodless stock market, generalize the issuance of corporate bonds, reduce the accordingly leverage of non-financial companies compared to banks, broaden the range of banking services offered, make the allocation of the high financial wealth of our households more efficient.
Well before the outbreak of the international crisis in May 2007, such an evolution of the Italian financial institutions and of the governance of our enterprises has however proved to be illusory. When many of the reformers thought they were only at the beginning of a radical reform process, the evolution of the Italian financial market came to a halt. The Italian banking sector reproduced its quasi-monopoly position in the intermediation of financial flows and blocked the development of other segments of the financial market, thus households continued to invest their financial wealth in an inefficient manner and businesses to depend from bank loans, too few successful businesses have jumped in size, institutional investors have weakened.
The burdening of the TUF has accompanied this regression of Italian capitalism, sanctioning the end of the reform project of the national financial market. Today, after six years of almost uninterrupted 'real' crisis, our productive apparatus has undergone and continues to undergo a drastic and disorderly downsizing and our banking sector has recourse to the credit crunch to keep the dynamics of problem loans under control. The return to the old normative modalities and to the old regulation takes place, therefore, in a situation of serious recession. Fifteen years after its launch, the TUF risks becoming yet another story of failure in attempts to innovate crucial aspects of Italian capitalism.
