"The idea that we can go on alone in a world like today's makes me laugh and is neither in heaven nor on earth". These are the words of the former premier and former president of the EU Commission Romano Prodi, who spoke in Milan at the presentation of the book "The international challenge of the Comit" which he wrote together with Carlo Brambilla, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, Andrea Manzella, questioned about the proposal by M5S leader Beppe Grillo to hold a referendum that could question Italy's presence in the single currency and in general on the anti-European winds.
The presentation of the book on the Italian Commercial Bank was therefore an opportunity for the professor to recall that “sonly united can you compete with United States and China”, starting right from the banking sector, “whose difficulties fall on the citizens even when it doesn't seem so directly. When it is said that the banking crisis does not affect citizens, it is wrong because it is the banks that hold up the economic system”.
It is precisely the decline of the Italian banking system, and in particular of the Comit, that is the theme of the book presented today in the presence, as well as of Prodi, of Marco Onado, professor of Law and Economics of Financial Markets and Comparative Financial Systems at Bocconi University and Alberto Quadrio Curzio, professor emeritus of Political Economy at the Catholic University of Milan.
“It used to be said that for Italians abroad there were two fixed points: the embassies and the Comit, the latter undisputed presence for our companies that were opening up to markets across the border”, said the speakers during the conference. What happened next, and which marked the decline of a of the first and most important Italian public banks until the merger with Banca Intesa in 2001, is explained in the book. In particular, with regard to the eighties of the twentieth century and later, the book examines the failed acquisition of Irving Bank in the USA and the privatization of Mediobanca.
