If you do a web search with “Italexit” as a keyword the first result is that “leaving the euro is worth it”. The "news" is based on a report by Mediobanca (edited by Guglielmi and Minenna - former councilor of the Raggi junta) published at the end of January and chewed and reduced to pills by the network. If it's not fake news, we're close. And the relationship takes some of her to feed it.
If, in fact, on the one hand, he not only says that 8 billion would be saved from leaving the euro, but that any benefit is rapidly running out because, after the entry into force of the European CAC rules in 2013, the securities that are issued cannot possibly be redenominated into a new lira (and therefore as pre-2013 securities are replaced with new issues, our debt becomes less and less "convertible" into lire), in other respects the report overshadows somewhat reckless hypotheses.
For example, behind the positive balance of 8 billion there is the hypothesis that 50% of the BTPs purchased by the ECB can be redenominated, a percentage that would emerge from an imaginary negotiation with the other Euro countries at the time of the incorporation of the Fiscal Compact into the legal framework of the Union and that the consequent debt in lire is monetized by the Bank of Italy (page 30 of the report).
It is not clear why Italy should have a say in such a vote once it decides to leave the Euro; the part of the report dedicated to the effects on balance sheet of the Bank of Italy it is also overall rather rough. And the negative effects on private debt, while being mentioned in the report, vanish in the final message.
But in addition to this partially incomplete financial accounting, the economic and financial effects are neglected: At what interest rates will we be able to finance ourselves once the single currency is abandoned? What will it be the effect on banks? Could the free movement of capital survive?
And also the causal link between the fall in productivity and the euro – which seems to be the foundation of the analysis, evoked at the beginning and at the conclusion of the report – is affirmed apodictically. All the more if we consider that the drop in productivity is recorded - dramatically - above all in the services sector, typically not very open to international competition, while the levels (not the dynamics) of productivity in the manufacturing sector are not so catastrophic (there we are still competitive with Germany).
The episode represents an emblematic case of how economic analysis, based on partial analyses, can throw almost false news into the press and web, immediately usable to feed opinions on which politicians can easily reap consensus. The doubt arises whether a bank, especially an Italian one, should not carefully assess the risk of "disturbance of the political market" (the financial one is already agitated on its own with the political uncertainty that followed the referendum) when it circulates a report on such a subject without having thoroughly explored all aspects of it.
Thinking badly, also considering the albeit brief (for now) political militancy of one of the authors, the doubt arises that this disturbance is an undesirable effect of the relationship. I can imagine how poor Enrico Cuccia watches his successors from up there in despair, for the ease with which they have abandoned the canons of confidentiality, a trademark of the Mediobanca house for half a century.
