A journey through the derivatives and problems of the small Italian entrepreneur, passing through the mysteries and drifts of the Stock Exchange. All this, however, without ever losing the thread of the story. Because the journey inaugurated today by radio 3 in the world of economics and finance it happens with the help of literature and cinema.
This is the second series of the programme “Like a novel, short history of money”, which first aired a year ago. Author and presenter is Leonardo Martinelli, managing editor of FIRSTonline. In directing, however, Elizabeth Parisi. The appointment is at 10:50 on Saturday and Sunday morning, for five consecutive weeks.
Economy and finance are increasingly at the center of information in newspapers, websites and TV. The objective of this series of ten episodes is to explain the meaning of the most diverse words and concepts, even very technical ones, from the tax wedge to leverage, from securitization to the functioning of rating agencies, using excerpts from books and films. A nineteenth-century novel, "Hard times", by Charles Dickens, for example, allows us to explain what GDP is and above all its possible variants, even gross national happiness, a parameter adopted in the small Himalayan state of Bhutan. While "Pinocchio", with the episode of the gold sequins, becomes a pretext for understanding how derivatives work. The Spanish crisis and the problems of its real estate bubble are instead addressed thanks to a film by Bigas Luna from the early XNUMXs, "Golden Eggs": apparently the links with the economy are very tenuous, but in reality the director managed to foresee the crack of the brick that will come… Visionary (from far 1963) was also the film “The Master of Vigevano”, by Elio Petri, which told the story, during the economic miracle, of an elementary teacher and his wife, who throws himself into the shoe manufacturing business. In the feature film there was already the enthusiasm of the small Italian entrepreneur, but also his tendency to evade taxes and his (ante litteram Northern League) contempt for culture. This cinematographic work, interpreted by Alberto Sordi, is used in the Radio 3 series to talk about the credit crunch and the problems of Italian entrepreneurs in the current crisis.
