The September 8th It is not a date that brings luck to Italy. In 1943 the Marshal Badoglio He announced on the radio the signing of the armistice with the Allies, which marked a moment of chaos for the Italian army with the disbandment of the troops and the capture of hundreds of thousands of Italian soldiers by the Nazis. September 8, 2025, however, marked the clear victory of the Opas of Monte dei Paschi su Mediobanca, the end of an era in Italian finance. After the death of Henry Cuccia, who founded it in 1946 with Raffaele Mattioli, Mediobanca had not been the temple of our finance for years, the capitalism's good living room and the clearing house between private and state capitalism. It was no longer all this, but Mediobanca continued to be a bank of absolute prestige, at least nationally, with the merit of professionalism and absolute independence and with a nest egg represented by its participation in the GeneraliPerhaps it should have woken up earlier and built an international reality in time that would have protected it from the ambitions of its main partners (Caltagirone e Dolphin (in the lead) and by the government's temptations. His takeover bid for Banca Generali and the idea of creating a wealth management champion were certainly interesting, but they arrived too late.
MPS: The takeover of Mediobanca is not a market operation because the Government was not the referee but a player
As Cuccia said already in the nineties and as he rightly recalls George La Malfa In his excellent book, "Cuccia and the Secret of Mediobanca," he writes, "if the Roman Empire fell, why shouldn't Mediobanca?" And indeed, the other day Mediobanca fell disastrously. In a market economy, it's not surprising that changes in ownership can also affect consolidated companies like Mediobanca. But that's not the point. The Mediobanca we've known so far isn't going into the attic for a while.market operation but for apower operation In this, the government played a crucial role, acting not as a referee but as a player, as had already happened with the hostile application of the Golden Power against Unicredit's takeover bid for Banco BPM. In a crucial battle like that over Mediobanca for the future of our finances, the government pushed many investors to side with it and with Caltagirone and Delfin, who never lost sight of Generali's treasure, which they hope to access through Mediobanca and Monte dei Paschi. September 8, 2025, will be remembered as the final day not so much, or not only, of Piazzetta Cuccia but of the market.
State and market: everyone does it that way, but is it right?
It is said, not without reason, that this is the “new world" and that "everyone does it that way": from Germany to Spain and Portugal, from the United States to China, political power has undermined the market. Very true, but the issue is not whether Italy is in line with the current trend in finance, but whether this trend is right or wrong. A democracy that forgoes a true market economy raises more than a few doubts.
