Friday September 9st to the Louis a conference will be held in honor of Stephen Micossi on the theme "resuming the thread of growth". A long-knotted thread seems almost inextricable: for almost thirty years Italy has been persistently - with the exception of the last year - at the tail end of the "ranking of economic growth" of European countries. The conference, which will be attended by the President of the Constitutional Court Julian Amato and the Governor of the Bank of Italy Ignazio Visco, is an opportunity to celebrate Stefano's career and his farewell to the General Management of Assonime which, as the conference poster recalls with an unusual association to his 75 years of age, he drove for 23 years. In this quarter of a century Stefano has injected into the historic Association of Italian joint-stock companies his passion for economic policy and his dream of a better Italy and Europe. The theme of today's conference well represents this passion. Under his leadership, Assonime received an extraordinary boost that never stopped with the innumerable studies produced, with the promotion of working groups on relevant issues of the national and European economy, with the constant monitoring of the decisions of governments and parliaments.
Stefano Micossi and his passion for monetary policy
Stefano's passion for economic policy dates back to the beginning of his career at the Research Department of the Bank of Italy, where I met him in the early XNUMXs, and he cultivated it throughout his professional life. His first fields of interest were money and the monetary policy. Then he moved on to the International Directorate where, together with another colleague of ours at the time, Fabrizio Saccomanni, who unfortunately is no longer with us except for the affectionate memory and esteem of all those who knew him closely, resumed dealing with international economics (Stefano had already had experience at the Monetary Fund). Some, barely concealed, incompatibility between his exuberant character and the stealthy step required of those who want to rise to the top of a large bureaucracy, but also the desire to get to know the decision-making mechanisms of companies and the industrial reality of the country more closely, the they brought in Confindustria, where he directed the Study Center between 1988 and 1994. From there he moved on to Directorate General for Industry of the European Commission to then arrive at the leadership of Assonime.
I am certain that even after leaving the operational responsibility of the Association, neither his intellectual commitment to the European project and its decision-making mechanisms nor the contributions on the major issues of financial regulation and public debt with which Stefano has enriched the Italian debate will diminish and international of these years.
