With the European elections of 25 May approaching, a Brancaleone army of scammers, self-styled professors of economics, television journalists accustomed to tickling the basest instincts of the public, politicians who try to unload their faults on the external enemy. They are not dangerous because the ancient common sense of old peasant Italy understands well that there is no maypole and that there are no miraculous solutions to get out of twenty or perhaps thirty years of mismanagement.
However, they could catch some gullible people and many who, while not fully believing in the magical regeneration promised by these hucksters, can still think that it can't get much worse than this, and therefore they might as well try. Unfortunately in politics the experiments take place on people's living bodies and they don't end in a few hours as in a chemistry laboratory, but they continue for years with terrible consequences. The Russians accepted Lenin's dream, the Germans freely voted for the National Socialist party and then both paid dearly for their "experiment".
Exiting the Euro would not only bring none of the much proclaimed advantages, but it would be a real tragedy for the economy and for Italy's political positioning. From an economic point of view, the theory of the return to the lira is essentially based on the fact that by reducing the value of the currency, our exports would have a competitive advantage and therefore we could sell more abroad. This can occur, provided that internal demand is compressed even further by cutting workers' incomes both through taxes (who remembers Amato who in 92 launched a tax package of 90 thousand billion?) and through the failure to recover losses caused by inflation.
If, on the other hand, as these new commentators on leaving the Euro seem to maintain, the reconquest of monetary sovereignty would make it possible to satisfy all our desires by printing money, then the advantages of devaluation would melt away like snow in the sun in a few weeks and we would find ourselves to the point before. Even worse because in the meantime we would have lost any possibility of obtaining credit from abroad since no one, after having lost a lot of the money they have invested in Italy so far, would be willing to risk a penny again, unless they had stratospheric interest rates.
But for the over-simplifiers like Mario Giordano, director of Berlusconi's Tg4, these seem too complicated reasoning. Better to say that savers would not see their monetary savings cut, that the State would have no problem repaying their own Bots in Euros with the new lire, and in short, that we could really care less about the rest of the world, which after all hates us because not only does it not help us, but that in the past it hatched a real "conspiracy" to get rid of Berlusconi and take possession of the Italian jewels.
Better to pretend to forget that in 92, before the devaluation of the lira, a good 50 billion lire left Italy in a few months, which were transformed into marks or dollars not by bad speculators but by small and medium-sized savers who wanted to put safe your hard-earned savings. And then there was no euro born precisely to prevent those crises, to eliminate competitive devaluations, and above all to harness the excessive power of the German mark by forcing the Bundesbank to share monetary power with all the other countries represented on the board of the ECB.
The responsibility for our crisis does not lie with the Euro, but with the loss of competitiveness we have accumulated over the last twenty years, so much so that our growth was on average half that of other European countries, and at the time of the 2009 crisis we had a drop of almost 6% of GDP against 2% of the others. And this negative trend is due to the waste of politics and the hostility towards any reform. Indeed we have made reforms that have worsened the functioning of the system starting with the reform of the powers of the Regions, paralyzing any decision-making capacity and exceeding any spending limit.
When the crisis broke out, the League (but the new secretary Salvini prefers not to remember this) contributed to the final crash by opposing both the pension reform and the abolition of the provinces and the thinning out of the jungle of companies controlled by local authorities. In this way the League was among the main responsible for the worsening of the crisis (almost a crack) and the fall of the Berlusconi government. And let us hope that Forza Italia remembers this before making alliances with similar fellow travelers.
In reality it is evident that after 15 years of monetary integration the European economies are strongly interconnected. A return to the lira would create very serious difficulties for banks and companies that have debts in Euros which would risk bankruptcy and in any case would have serious difficulties in financing their investments. Savers would be severely penalized because their bank deposits would be transformed into lire with ever decreasing purchasing power. We would have more unemployed, less consumption, less production. Other than the town of Bengodi where we would have enough lire to be able to satisfy all our needs.
Let's not talk about the political consequences of an Italy isolated from the rest of Europe and viewed with suspicion (more than what we already carry) as an element of disturbance for all the others. It is enough to remember that our country had its best moment when in the post-war period it decided to open the borders (overcoming the resistance of Confindustria and the unions united in conservative closures) and was able to participate in the great expansion of world trade. Autoarchy is not for us. And competitive devaluations would lead other countries to defend themselves.
But beyond all economic and political reasoning, what is most surprising is that all these demagogues show up right now when there are clear signs of an economic improvement that could be strengthened with suitable policies by our government, aimed at consolidating the good recovery of credibility that Italy is starting to enjoy. Foreign investment increases both in government bonds and in private companies. Interest rates are falling and banks are starting to lend as evidenced by the 18% increase in mortgage loans disbursed in the last quarter. Domestic demand is showing small signs of awakening as evidenced by new car purchases.
Of course, the European governance system is not optimal. Serious mistakes have been made in the management of the crisis in recent years, as acknowledged by the President of the ECB Mario Draghi. However, the European banking union has been launched and we are one step away from adopting more courageous policies both in terms of monetary policy and in terms of support for investments and training. Proposing an exit from the Euro today would mean nullifying all the progress made by Europe and shelving the possible changes also pushed by the Italian presidency of the EU. What presidency would it be if we were outside the Euro?
The truth is that Italian citizens have paid dearly for the inability of centre-right governments to implement the downsizing of the role of the state which they had also promised, and of centre-left governments to implement those welfare and labor market adjustments necessary not to undermine the "rights" of workers, but to avoid turning them into millions of unemployed. We deluded ourselves that we could continue to feast (but not everyone ate in the same way) without paying the bill. But this is not possible. Do we now want to continue running after the smoke sellers, the adventurous illusions of the exit from the Euro, or are we seriously thinking about rolling up our sleeves and aiming for a possible and now within reach future?
