After the story of the appointment of the Governor of the Bank of Italy, while the hearings are taking place at the Parliamentary Commission, it is not useless to deal with the principles of management of the system. It is enough to recall them to understand that the defects are in the institutions, beyond the behavior of the people, necessarily conditioned.
– Community law guarantees the independence of the Bank of Italy, a component of the ECB, in the monetary mission; it's not about supervision. It is the Italian law that has delegated the exercise, and the organization, to the Bank itself. The management of the currency as it intervenes on macro-economic aggregates can be entrusted to the technical mission of an independent Office, without violating the principle of concentration of the Executive on the Government. Instead, the Supervision is the administration of private operators: both as a policy of stability and definition of ownership structures; and police (inspection) on individual companies. Therefore it would require to be subjected to the three constraints demanded by the democratic order of the Constitution: a) dependence on the Executive, responsible to Parliament, in turn to the electoral people; b) strict legality (rule of law); c) the judicial action in the defense of the addressees of the administrative action.
We recall that the 1937 banking law entrusted Supervision to the Inspectorate under the authority of the Head of Government, at the time to preserve the prerogatives of the executive under a totalitarian regime, with little sensitivity for other profiles. Private protection remained weak, a legacy insensitive to the impact of Republican innovations, the subsequent concentration of Supervision on the Bank of Italy itself. he made it an autonomous apparatus, strong in supporting the monetary function; influential on the elaboration of the relevant legislation; even influential on the same rotation of the Governor: we have seen it. Let's say better. The Bank ends up impersonating the banking system; Representative of entities protected from competition, capable of self-management; essentially a corporative system refractory to the constraints of the division of powers, generically replaced by informal dialogue, indicated in the jargon as moral persuasion. In the logic of the Apparatus, the horizon of the people is the contingent bureaucratic management, with a vocation for conservation, which accommodates the eventuality of arranging things in the opaque, for the solidarity interest of the participants. The exponents of the Banca d'Italia themselves are the unwitting victim of this, who find no shelter in the order of competences, which would oblige everyone to play his part.
Crisis management is the point of emergence of the intrinsic messes of the system, revealed in the constant practice of informal bailouts for mergers and mergers, with high implicit costs; explicit to contain the chain of collapses; not infrequently with undue repercussions in favor of the people involved (eg subtraction from the penal consequences of the declaration of insolvency; today's news: “Veneto Banca, here are the shareholders safeguarded from the bankruptcy!). This is the point that has come into conflict with the recent Community legislation on resolution procedures (bail-in); which, to have clearly understood the constraint of legality, removes the management of the crisis from discretion, with the consequences we are experiencing.
– The Governor's appointment is political. Adumbrate, we have heard, that discussing it politically attentive to the autonomy of the Bank of Italy confirms how deeply rooted the distorted idea of independence has become.
On the merits, it would be appropriate to resume the practice of appointing a person from outside the body that he will have to direct, not only to escape internal career expectations; for the experience of various professionals; not least for the freedom from previous events, which can increase the authority of the chosen one.
– It was wrong to separate the competences of the Bank of Italy from Consob by functions rather than by subjects, as others proposed. Not only is it difficult to distinguish functions and responsibilities: the skirmishes between the Authorities reveal it. Above all, however, the intention was to initiate banking disintermediation with the stimulus to direct deposits, in the condition of a financial market which was now considered mature to articulate the competition between banking intermediation: short-term credit; and direct deposits: suitable for medium-term risk financing with shares and bonds. On the one hand the market operators; on the other, the banks, to be barred from trading on the stock market, at least for a certain time: this was proposed. Solution deeply opposed by the banks, which ultimately also took charge of financing the plants and fixed assets, moreover through the disbursement of short-term credit, with an aggravation of the outstanding debt, with growth difficulties for businesses. I recall that the first choice, to give the banking Authority also competence over the stock market, was then corrected with the establishment of Consob, but with the compromise of distinguishing competences by function, which thus preserved the centrality of banking intermediation, accentuated from the novelty of the bank with universal operations, which has become dominant on the stock exchange, but with no interest in developing. Choice of short-sighted selfishness, decided through administrative channels, which prevented the development of a securities market favorable to the growth of even smaller companies. The opportunity has been lost.
– Surveillance, even more so if it is a control police, meets individual rights in the interests of the addressees. Therefore the appropriate jurisdiction is the ordinary judge. Recent legislation has the opposite orientation, focusing the matter on the administrative judge, which consolidates finance even more in a sectoral order. I stress that the division of jurisdictions is an exquisite political choice, which cannot be obscured by the alleged technicalities on the distinction of law from legitimate interest.
– The enforceability would require rebuilding the legislative fabric. But the problem of the order of sources and the corresponding procedures (laws, regulations, circulars, even letters of reply to queries) has become so pervasive that this is not the place to address it.
– The application of sanctions entrusted to Consob and the Bank of Italy, not remedied by internal subdivisions, is a serious violation of the division of powers. It must be entrusted to a quasi-judicial body, completely independent of the sector Authorities, first of all in the appointments, before which the cross-examination can be developed.
The current situation is not transparent, even more tangles things, as well as degrades the protection of the recipient.
The political discussion must be concentrated on the logic of the institutions. Rewrite the rules of stability, I read Bruni in La Stampa (13/11). The reform should be tackled with the help of a preliminary study (the so-called white paper). But, it should be emphasized, not entrusted to the same party interested in the reform. Reform commissions must not be entrusted to the same bodies: to lawyers for order; to judges for bankruptcy civil justice; to the Supervisory Authority for the new configuration. Instead it is this frequent habit, I would say normal. It is a serious symptom of corporatism, which weakens the technical understanding of problems in Parliament. Populism is its outlet, uncorrected by independent arguments offered to various positions.
