The passing of the days confirms that great is the confusion of ideas under the sky of finance generated by the technically unexpected decision of President Renzi to call into question the Anti-corruption with arbitration tasks to resolve disputes between the various parties involved in the vicissitudes of four small bank notes; like others that have always been proud and victims of the pernicious political ideology of the link with the territory.
Already the use of arbitration proposed by President Renzi suggests that in his political vision of the facts two different responsibilities must be composed and evaluated; that of the seller of the "rotten apples" (or of the manipulators of share prices) and those of the saver duped by the proposing fake, thus accrediting the suspicion in public opinion that the regulatory, inspection and information supervision of Bankitalia and Consob have spectacularly failed.
Nothing more manifestly equivocal for the formation of a correct public opinion, which can only be explained by the never ending story of political activity aimed at gaining, whatever the cost, consensus on the notoriously very reactive field of savers. Consensus unfortunately equally invoked by the financial industry, often ancillary to economic policy, in its three segments: credit, securities and insurance.
Renzi's proposal deliberately ignores the fact that the financial industry, like any other industry, most recently see the case of the fake Volkswagen, is a complex organization which, in the absence of effective internal controls, allows even fraudulent behavior towards of customers; organization and internal controls that should balance the different responsibilities of management, but which are almost never well defined, well balanced and correctly assigned.
An example of a school is the conflict between those who, within the same intermediary, in compliance with the supervisory provisions evaluate the risk associated with each financial product offered to customers and those who are encouraged to place products which offer the maximum commissions for the intermediary itself. These are facts known to all, but that it would be absurd to require vigilance to remedy them. To create the doubt that the responsibilities lie outside the financial industry is to deny the reality of the facts.
If the events of these days were declassified by crisis of the top branches of supervision, to facts of "bad finance" which occurred as a result of management's behavior in conscious disregard of the rules of correctness in the conduct of business, the political debate could more constructively take the road, in all likelihood not the bearer of easy immediate consensus, also having to abandon the ideology of small is beautiful, of how to identify some measures which could potentially contain fraudulent behavior within the financial industry.
For example: the separation between commercial bank and investment bank; the standardization of financial products to be offered to retail customers, the timing and proportion of bonuses to management; the powers of the BoD over the work of management; banking groups and the legal function of the board of directors of investee companies which removes responsibility from the bureaucracies at the top of banking groups, and so on. This should be the task of economic policy, not that of asking others (if ever in the guise of aseptic politically neutral technical bodies) to solve the problems that these facts have placed under their noses.
