The first immediate reactions exposed in the major national press are surprising for not having fully grasped the backbone of the considerations themselves in the final considerations of Governor Visco: the current conditions and prospects of the individual countries of the euro area are closely linked to those of European construction (page 13). In fact, many immediate reactions favored the domestic aspects (tax wedge, private and public investments, small large companies and Italian banks, and so on) neglecting that European system (appropriately accompanied by the memory of Altiero Spinelli and the Ventotene manifesto) from whose implementation some of the domestic recipes follow, above all with reference to the financial stability to be ensured for the euro area, to be understood as a common good at the supranational level. It has been overlooked that growth prospects also strongly depend on the loss of sovereignty of each individual country in the euro area.
On the other hand, it is not surprising that this was caught with anger by the Northern League Salvini who hastily proposed to "send Governor Visco to jail" (Repubblica.it of 31 May 2016), perhaps fearing that the impeccable and lucid considerations of Visco himself could make breach in the mind of some of his constituents, but at the same time ignoring, the wretch, who was evoking the events that struck the Bank of Italy in the persons of Paolo Baffi and Mario Sarcinelli during the most troubled period of the Italian republic.
Annoying for many of those present must have been the paragraph, not surprisingly the longest and placed at the center of the final considerations, bearing the title: "The construction of Europe: progress and uncertainties" (pp. 13-17). Governor Visco's support for the opportunity to proceed with the loss of sovereignty of Italian domestic politics with "the support or replacement of national intervention instruments with similar supranational instruments" or to have "a shared public budget, which can only pass through further cessions of national sovereignty” which “would guarantee the possibility of implementing policies consistent with the cyclical conditions of the various economies”. Just as stinging is the passage where it is argued that "It would in fact be illusory to believe that we can govern the economy and finance, whose global dimensions are evident, within the restricted sphere of individual European countries ... The union of Europe is accomplished with the development of democratic institutions designed to manage the common sovereignty” and that it is necessary “the support or replacement of national instruments of intervention with analogous supranational institutions”.
This brief anthology, taken from Governor Visco's final considerations, illustrates with sufficient clarity the need that the national policy mantra "we grow with reforms" must now be suitably completed with "reforms that lead to the loss of national sovereignty".
From this point of view, Governor Visco's considerations prompt some long-term reflections on the structure of the Italian banking system and on the correlated modest contribution to the development of the real economy. In fact, Governor Visco notes that "there is also pushing for a revision of the business model the evolution of the financial system towards a structure in which alternative financing channels to the economy play a growing role (...)" while "in Italy the non-bank intermediation remains decidedly less developed than in other countries”. Indeed, since the early XNUMXs, despite the emergence of universal banking, corporate dependence on bank credit has continued in proportions unknown in more established economies. It should be added that the aggregation of many credit institutions does not appear to have led to significant changes in the propensity of banks to persevere in the pernicious practice of "links with the territory". In this regard, Governor Visco notes that "it is necessary to proceed expeditiously (...) overcoming the old logics of mere supervision of the territory which have often contributed to exacerbate, rather than mitigate, the difficulties of the real economy and of the banks themselves".
In Italy, the banking industry is shown to be incapable of requesting risk capital participation from entrusted subjects, who are thus exempt from running any investment risk; both, Minister Andreatta noted as early as 1981, reluctant to promote "investment banking (...) activities capable of selecting and preparing operations for the public offer of shares in companies that intend to expand their shareholding and get listed on the stock exchange" (Intervention by the Minister of the Treasury at the ABI assembly, 24 June 1981, p. 24, mimeo).
The Italian banking industry has always shown the absence of consolidated and widespread professionalism in the investment banking sector: with the exception of Mediobanca, which however always gave the cards to the same families, and IMI which once had a body of engineers capable of assessing the creditworthiness of the company requesting it. Once upon a time, many banks had engineers and sector specialists who visited the entrusted companies to assess the risks associated with investments and the goodness of the borrower on the spot. Today engineers, together with mathematicians and physicists, are in the back office developing sophisticated mathematical and statistical tools for risk assessment and capital absorption. Nothing bad, except that no one visits companies anymore to give the back office sensitive information to evaluate the cards presented by the borrower.
In conclusion, it would therefore be appropriate to reflect on the opportunity to proceed with the separation of the investment bank from the commercial one, which today coexist within the universal bank and the multifunctional group. It would follow that the collection of savings by the investment bank would be carried out mainly through the issue of bonds to replace bank bonds whose consistency is now equal to 38 per cent of GDP (Annual Report, p. 159). In turn, the commercial bank, as in the past but today in the presence of the bail in, should limit itself to collecting short-term savings (guaranteed up to a certain limit, as is already envisaged in the Italian legal system and excluded from the bail in up to one hundred thousand deposits in euros) and to transform the maturities for the disbursement of loans to households and small and medium-sized enterprises.
