The absence of realism does not help stop the decline. Utopia is in fact the best companion of "nothing changes", at least from Tomasi di Lampedusa onwards - And realism does not inspire an article published on the Noise from Amerika website by Sandro Brusco and taken up by the newly formed association "stop the decline".
With the shared intention of demonstrating that "Another debt/GDP ratio is possible" it is stated that "the objective of 105 billion in total real estate disposals in 6 years shouldn't be impossible to achieve". Even with the benefit of the use of the conditional, it is a forecast, in my opinion, absolutely unrealistic. This judgment is based on three elements:
a) The historical experience; as brilliantly recalled by Mario Sarcinelli in a conference at CNEL last July, that experience indicates that it would be impossible to carry out a disposal program of only 5 billion a year (well less than the 35 hypothesized by Brusco). Historical experience is the thermometer of an administration which reacts with a bureaucratic frown to reductions in the perimeter (moreover unknown in its exact dimensions) and slowly, finding easy support in complex and tangled urban planning regulations (issued by the various levels of the administration).
b) Lo severely recessive state of the real estate market where sales have fallen sharply (according to data from the State Property - around 30% compared to 2006 in the residential sector). And who should buy the 35 billion a year? There are no buyers, and all the more with a very limited return such as that offered today by public buildings, as can also be read from the comments on Noise from Amerika itself.
c) One overestimation of the size of the marketregardless of the negative economic cycle; consider that public divestments, for the whole of Europe, can be quantified at 2-3 billion (see the speech by Antonio Guglielmi of Mediobanca at the aforementioned CNEL conference) and therefore it is unimaginable a market 10 times larger for Italy.
Even the estimate of privatizations seems to me to be largely erroneous by excess. Brusco believes that it can be privatized for 90 billion in three years. Again, I base myself on three considerations:
a) The historical experience; it would mean doubling what was achieved in the golden three-year period of Italian privatizations 1997-1999 when shares in public companies were sold for 50 billion euro.
b) The portfolio has become depleted compared to then and less attractive companies have remained (except for the remaining shares of ENEL and ENI). Furthermore some companies (this is the case of FS and Poste) they require non-marginal interventions in the corporate structures in the planning and service contracts which, judging by how the affair of the appointments to the Transport Authority is unfolding, would take much longer than the six months hypothesized by Brusco; and even for companies owned by local authorities, the key to the problem has not yet been found, which is essentially juridical-constitutional, to oblige them to sell.
c) The financial crisis of the markets poses some problems regarding the nationality of potential buyers, probably neither European nor American. Which government would hand over an energy supply company to a non-aligned producer country? I would suggest going back to reviewing how Thatcher (whose liberal beliefs there should be no doubt) reacted when the Kuwaiti oil company tried to acquire control of the newly privatized British Petroleum.
