The Italian newspapers estimate that there are three hundred billion euros owned by Italian companies and private citizens illegally constituted abroad. This figure has 'emerged' as the result of the Italian government offering an amnesty for capital return. While in the United Kingdom amnesty terms are the loss of 50% of your stake, in Italy they're offering 5% if only Italians will reveal where all the money is, and how much of it there is. Bringing it back is a secondary consideration.
The macro economics of public and private debt are fairly interchangeable. The Maastricht Treaty has emphasized public debt exclusively - wrongly - because the financial crisis has been triggered by private as well as public debt. From Southeast Asia in 1997 to Latvia today.
Mr Tremonti is mounting an essentially propaganda exercise after growing tired of false claims that Italy is going under a debt tsunami - that, in truth, would be the United Kingdom. The three hundred billion is the stash of only the little people - the small to medium companies, the professionals, the furbetti del quartierino and their friends revealed by the Fazio disgrace. The serious money will not just stay where it is or where its owners would like it to be next, it is not for the state to even consider, as Mr Tremonti recognised when he denied that the amnesty favoured mafia money.
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Yes, I bet the Italian government would like to get its hands on that money. Or even find out where it is, which would come to the same thing in the end.
I bet, too, that it won't.
Italians are far too sensible to trust governments with anything.
I wonder how much of that wealth is held in non-currency instruments of one sort and another?
Reading this and your recent post on how to live in Europe have brought home to me the massive difference between how the Brits see "authority" and how others do. Fascinating.
I would prefer a situation where people can safely trust their government, but increasingly it feels like our trust is being used against us and that an Italian attitude would be much more prudent.
Do you think we can go back to a position where the British government is genuinely trustworthy?
In a word, Blue, No. There is every indication that a sane person in England has nothing to do with authority of any government kind unless it is unavoidable - hence the headlong creation of unavoidable contacts so beloved of authoritarian New Labour.
Here, there is always the Tribunal. For example, recently in Taranto a lo9cal council, newly elected, chose only men to hold all offices in the comune. The Administrative Tribunal summoned them, shame-faced and shuffling about in their middle-aged masculinity, to explain themselves after a complaint from 50% of the population that they felt under-represented, and ordered either another election with an appropriate representation in the lists, or an allocation of responsibilities that reflected the gender make-up of the area. And they were all over the national telly and looking very bad. Taranto doesn't go to the polls again but they have been forced to put women there. Redress here is very fast - though the co-opted women weren't elected. Still they are women. and at the next elections there will be women in the party lists.
This is an estimate of how much was held illegally WY. indeed, an estimate of how much is going to come back. There is n o idea of the form in which it was held. Banks are setting up special branches in the motherland to receive the money.
Incidentally the Italian pension system is actually contributing to financing the budget deficit. In 2006 it did so to the tune of almost 1% of GDP - not much of GDP but a lot of the deficit to be financed. I'm really tired of Italians being bullied by the IMF, the World Bank, the OECD over the false non- viability of their pension system.
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