Among the various calls for a "non-populist" policy that you avoid confusing voters with oversimplified messages, the Sardines call the world of information to "protect, defend and get closer to the truth and translate all this effort into messages faithful to the facts" (point n. 4 of the 6 programmatic points of the Sardines). The topic where this call has perhaps been put to the hardest test in Italy for years is that of the banking crises.
Briefly reconstructing what happened, banking crises in Europe started after the outbreak of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), linked to subprime mortgages and structured finance which, over ten years ago, led to the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, shaking global finance to the core. Shortly thereafter, banking crises rained down in various European countries. Initially, the banks that were most exposed by investing in structured finance were involved. Various European governments, including in Germany, intervened heavily to save many of their banks from collapse. And, incidentally, it is precisely from there that the impulse to introduce them into Europe came the bail-in law, which seeks to avoid (or at least reduce) state intervention in bank bailouts.
In that first phase, Italian banks remained on the sidelines of the crisis because they had maintained a business model oriented towards traditional intermediation – collection of deposits to make credit – greatly limiting financial investments. However, since the Italian economy suffered a strong recession in 2009 (due to the CFG), suffered another one in 2012 (due to the austerity interventions of the Monti government) and remained in substantial stagnation in the remaining years, the dark has come also for Italian banks with the growing difficulty of debtors in repaying the loans received. Thus, since 2015 the banking crises in Italy have become recurring.
At the time, while finding a way to save Monte dei Paschi, the government let four regional banks go into resolution (so they say in the era of the bail-in) in November 2015, causing quite a few stomach aches among customers who often unaware of the risks they had taken on their savings and now they found them reduced. Other important crises then occurred with the two Venetian popular banks and with the Genoa savings bank. Lastly, in recent weeks, the Bank of Italy decided to place the popular bank of Bari, the largest locally-owned bank still in the South, under extraordinary administration, after the season of crisis which, in the 90s, the southern banks he had eliminated them or brought them under external ownership.
As I have hinted at in the previous lines, I think that having bank failures is a painful but almost physiological event when a country suffers a serious decline in GDP, as happened in Italy (almost -10%), without finding a way to activate a prompt and robust recovery. If I may cite a personal experience, in 1998, in the maelstrom of the Asian crisis, Indonesia suffered a 15% drop in GDP and 50% of the country's banks were technically in trouble. It is evident that, in these cases, the massive bank failures do not mainly depend on bad corporate choices, but on the negative macroeconomic context. The case of individual bank failures is different when the context is favourable: then it is legitimate to seek the responsibilities of the directors.
Well, going back to the call of the sardines, are banking crises correctly represented by the information system in Italy? Generally not. In fact, the typical editorial starts without even referring to the macroeconomic context and concentrates on finding the responsibilities in the wrong choices of the bank directors. Naturally, it should be noted that where those responsibilities exist, it is right to pursue them. However, if crises are not placed within the unfavorable macroeconomic context, there is a risk of making "populist" information, in search of the infector, potentially discrediting the entire banking sector, which is unfair and very harmful.
Will the tone of information on banking crises become more truthful, following the indications of the Sardines, with the work of the new parliamentary commission of inquiry into the banking system?
