The economic crisis that has shaken Italy in the last few years has hit big capital and, above all, the banks. The long struggle between the European Central Bank and the Bank of Italy has had a provisional outcome in favor of the first: the ECB has achieved a reform that eliminates the interference of the Italian private banks in the Bank of Italy, and opens the road for European banks to participate in the festival of acquisitions and concentrations that is about to be unleashed in the Italian market. The head of BankItalia's “governatore”, Antonio Fazio, has fallen due to his failed attempt at defending the “Italianity”of the peninsular banks. Fazio defends himself saying that he quit (“my consciousness is clean”) because he had opposed the “strong powers”, though not those of Italian imperialism, but those of the strongest European financial capital, represented by the ECB. Ultra-catholic and champion of “ethical financing”, Fazio is under investigation for “favoring” and leaking confidential information.
Beyond the scandals and crossed accusations between deputies and political operators of the government and the opposition (also among themselves), the episode unveils a political crisis that will seriously affect quite a few.
When Fazio tried to stop the attempt of the Dutch bank ABN Amro to buy the Italian Antonveneta some months ago, and then the Spanish BBVA hunger for the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL), the Italian bourgeoisie stood up to defend him against the BCE accusations and the insinuations that he had favored local groups.
The struggle of the major European banks to enter the Italian market revealed the weakness of the banks in that country, and the need for “protection” by the central authorities. While during the last few years the prices of industrial products rose to 15%, the costs of banking services rose to 42%. This “tax” on savings, and the costs it represents for companies, provoked controversies among the industrialists, who are often hostages of those banks, and who would not look badly on a concentration of the sector, in order to have cheaper credit with less extortion.
Already the bankruptcy of the alimentary giants Cirio and Parmalat (behind which Fazio was present) had shown how the banks “pressed” the owners in order to get their hands on the property of these companies, demanding the credit without funds that had been given without limits, until the companies where “in the custody” of the same banks.
The Fazio case is, however, the most significant, because he only managed to (temporarily) avoid bankruptcy by forcing creditors to convert their un-cashable credits to Fiat shares.
With the question of the Argentine “tango bonds”, the expropriation of the savings involved tens of thousands of Italian petite bourgeois, retirees and workers. The emitting banks sold junk bonds months before the Argentinazo, and the Central Bank, with Fazio at its head, backed this operation knowing without any doubt that these papers were worthless. It was a small “corralito” (bank freeze) for saving the exposed Italian banks, which had billions in titles that had no value, which in this way were passed on to their clients, charging them with their non-cashable loans.
The attempts for blocking foreign capital from entering pointed to favoring a group of “finance men” and “riders” that were looking to improve their positions in the high finance world. Within this group there were not only “Real Estate developers”, but also the political leadership of the former Communist Party, the DS, and the right-wing Northern League. Fazio was looking to favor a concentration of banking capital in the hands of upstart Italian capitalists. Those favored were politically linked to the Northern League (Fiorani) on one side, and to the cooperatives and their banks (Consorte, Unipol) controlled by the former Communist Party, the present-day DS, on the other.
Beyond the complex judiciary plot that involves tens of important characters, what has been unveiled is the culmination of a period of financial explosions started some years ago, and the beginning of a yet more unstable stage, because now the European banks (behind many of which hides US capital) have a free hand to go “shopping” in Italy and laying hold of a good part of the atomized peninsular banking sector.
But, why do the Italian banks need to be defended in such a way? The Italian banking system is protected by written and unwritten laws that contradict those of the European Union and the European Central Bank. What lies behind this is not the interests of the “customers” but the control over billions of Euros and shares packages of major industrial companies. Unwilling to lose their privileged positions and the thousands of links with the regional political cliques, the “paltry” Italian banks are not in condition to finance big industry in crisis, which cannot return the loans received by these same banks. That means that behind the bank crisis, a colossal industrial crisis is hidden. The growing banking concentration, caused by foreign penetration will create a tendency towards the expropriation of the petty bourgeoisie, on the one hand, and the expulsion of the labor force, on the other.
This dispute over the control of savings and the surplus produced by Italian workers, which affects the insurance (Unipol) and services sector, is also related to the attempts at privatizing the retirement system, in order to redirect, in this way, more compulsory savings towards the banks and the insurance companies that will administer future private pensions —as we know, a cake made with labor power which no capitalist vampire wants to lose.
For the moment, the particular results of this crisis are that the election of the Italian Central Bank “governatore” will fall on a “Europe-ist” of the US financial group Goldman Sachs. The role of controlling competition and fusions will also be transferred to the “antitrust”, which means the end of the Central Bank’s tutelage over it.
The struggle is just in its initial stage, and the bourgeoisie, with its internal struggles, uses the parties and trade union bureaucracies too, in order to get the support of broad sectors of the workers. Days with even more “blood and tears” will come for the Italian workers, either with Berlusconi’s reelection or with a center-left government headed by Prodi in 2006.
An independent workers’ party is necessary, that defends interests antagonistic to all the bourgeois sectors and struggles for the nationalization of the bank under workers’ control, without compensation, and for a workers’ government that puts an end to the permanent expropriation of the efforts of all the Italian workers.