“The bankruptcy of a bank is not like that of any company. If one shop closes tomorrow, another can be opened in its place. If, on the other hand, one bank fails, the risk is that it will fail immediately after another. The risk is contagion”. As the Governor of the Bank of Italy, Ignazio Visco, answered the question of the former director of Corriere della Sera and Sole 24 Ore, Ferruccio De Bortoli, on the thorny issue of bank bailouts and repayments to savers. “In reality, however – continued Visco, guest of honor on the final day of the Trento Festival of Economics – it also happens that banks go bankrupt. In the US, 10 banks have failed in the last 500 years, many of them small but some of a size that would be significant for us. He took over a fund with public capital and facilitated their mergers ”.
Visco's intervention then followed that of the final Thoughts presented on 31 May at the Bank of Italy, covering subjects of a more general nature but without forgetting current affairs. When asked about the mini Bots, the instrument hypothesized by the Treasury to finance the public debt but on which the sovereignists have made quite a few mistakes in Parliament, hypothesizing emissions in currencies other than the euro, the Governor was trenchant: "The mini Bots, however small, they are still bots, e they are not a solution for the Italian public debt. The problem is that the cost of debt exceeds the rate of economic growth” because Italy is the only Western country to have fallen into what Visco, in Trento, defined a “vicious circle”. “A few months ago the French economist Olivier Blanchard he had expressed optimism, saying that as long as interest rates are so low as to be lower than GDP growth rates, there are no problems. The point is that this is not the case for Italy”.
The public debt, recalled Visco, was around 120% at the time of the negotiations for the single currency, then fell to around 100% in the early 130s, "thanks also to the sale of real estate assets", to then rise again today to above XNUMX %. “Low growth creates two big problems: it makes it difficult to repay the debt and causes mistrust in Italy. And when there is volatility, this is reflected in everyone's financial statements: the state, the banks, but also families and businesses”. Whether the recipes of this Government will be useful, it is not known and Visco has not gone too far, however reiterating the rejection of the flat taxabove all by virtue of the well-known criterion of fiscal progressivity enshrined in the Constitution, admitting however that "the Italian tax system, 50 years old and very complex, should be rethought in the light of a world that has completely changed: I am thinking above all of the technology and trends demographics. The priorities must be to reward work and encourage business”.
Certainly, however, as emerged in numerous interventions during the Trento Festival, Europe is not to blame. “Europe guaranteed peace and prosperity after the Second World War. Then it developed first with trade agreements, then services, finally with the single currency. Then the integration process suddenly stopped, and that was the error. What we need today is a complete banking union, which has not yet been fully achieved, and a fiscal union. And then a union of intent on the great demographic, technological and globalization challenges. Today Europe generates distrust but the problem is not Europe, but our slowness, I mean Italy's, in adapting to a world that has changed a lot”. After all, Germany, which is aging like us, reacted much better to the 2008 crisis: “In the absence of domestic demand, you intercepted foreign demand more than we did. And then she understood that the world has changed and we need not only to be more educated, but to be educated in a different way ”.
