When the curtain rises on the promised reform of the cooperative credit banks (Bcc) in the next few days, it will be better understood if and to what extent the Renzi government really intends to follow the path suggested by Federcasse, the trade association that gathers the majority of the CCBs but not all, by aggregating and centralizing this part of the banking system into a single parent holding company. If this were the outline of the reform, the CCB system, as clearly emerged in recent days at a conference promoted at Luiss by the Capriglione Foundation, would run two major risks: that of distorting the mutual system of the CCBs, which is based on the centrality of the member cooperator and on the link with the surrounding area, and that of creating the third national banking group without providing it with the assets and know-how necessary to compete on equal terms with banks of the caliber of Intesa Sanpaolo and Unicredit.
But a centralized reform of cooperative credit would cause the banking system to run another and perhaps even more serious risk: that of further unbalancing the world of Italian banks towards gigantism and the progressive reduction or disappearance of small institutions.
The rhetoric of "small is beautiful" has had its day and nobody thinks of dusting it off, but one wonders whether in the banking field it is not the case to avoid the opposite risk and it is not the time to open one's eyes to the extremely dangerous dogma of "great is always beautiful", which since Lehman has already done irreparable damage and which it has continued to do, throughout the global crisis, with the gigantic losses of Royal Bank of Scotland, of Lloyds Banking Group and Deutsche Bank, not to mention the Swiss and Spanish banking giants.
The idea of the bizarre European banking regulation of treating all banks equally, penalizing small banks in terms of capital ratios and compliance, contrary to what the United States and Japan are doing, is already preposterous in itself but it is even more inconceivable in a country with widespread capitalism like Italy, where large companies can now be counted on the fingers of two hands and the vast majority of the production system is instead made up of medium-sized but above all small, very small and micro-enterprises for which the relationship with the local bank is essential.
Strengthening and merging the Bcc system is right, but there are ways and means of aggregating them and the binding and centralistic one proposed by Federcasse seems to respond more to internal accounts regulations of the association than to the interests of cooperative credit and the Italian banking system and it would be good if the Government, which has the great merit of having reformed the cooperative banks in a way no one had ever managed to do, opened its eyes before making false steps and committing unforgivable blunders.
