The professor. Paolo Savonapresident of Consob, since his first speech at the market (in June 2019), has relied on quotes from philosophers, writers, or politicians to convey the ‘doctrine’ of his mandate. The last quote, the one that characterized the annual meeting on 25 June 2024, is from Søren Kierkegaard, “philosopher of existential immobility who warned: «For man there comes a moment in which he no longer has freedom of choice, because he chose, but because he didn’t do it and others chose for him”. Quote that comes after the warning from Savona himself: “It must be acknowledged that the world is evolving in this direction and everyone’s behavior – like it or not, whether they are slowed down or not – will have to take this into account.” In short, the president of Consob, at the end of his speech, seems to want to conclude a reflection that began in June 2019.
That year Savona relied on “Plato’s cave” to tell the market that it had to open its eyes and not be fooled by the “dim lights of knowledge” that penetrate the “cave” and “project a distorted image of reality onto the walls” . Only in this way would “what has been authoritatively defined as ‘the era of resentment’ in which we live” come to an end and would the ‘era of hopes’ of bringing globalization and technological innovations to the service of all be recovered.
In June 2020, Savona relied, instead, on the thoughts of Carlo Azeglio Ciampi to ask himself whether “the increasingly close integration between the three sectors of finance (credit, investment and insurance activities), from the point of view of both the subjects and the products and business strategies, does not make it necessary to summarize the entire discipline of credit, financial and insurance intermediation in a Consolidated Law. In short, a text that realizes the need for a unitary regulation of banking, financial and insurance legislation”.
Two speeches which, in fact, prepared the ground for the subsequent messages from Savona who, in June 2021, asked Guido Carli and Luigi Einaudi for help to remember the “responsibility” of Consob (and not only) to “advance solutions” , even if these solutions are criticized and considered crazy or, to put it in Savona’s own words in June 2022, “Metonian”. That year, in fact, the president of the Supervisory Authority cited Aristophanes’ comedy “The Birds” to defend his “economic analyses, innovative techniques and political proposals that go against existing norms and prevailing ways of thinking”.
A long journey that seems to want to end precisely in this June 2024 with Kierkegaard arriving the year after the quote from Primo Levi who, as Savona recalled in his speech in June 2023, wrote: «Do not hide behind the hypocrisy of neutral science: you are learned enough to be able to estimate whether a dove or a cobra or a chimera or perhaps nothing will emerge from the egg you are hatching.”
Quotations (that of Levi and Kierkegaard) which hide the great conviction that “history continues undaunted to offer us surprises and to solicit new commitment, to improve the functioning of the financial market and protect savings”, stated the president of Consob in the conclusion of his speech of June 25th. In this path “the reversal of the ongoing trend of a growth of finance as an end in itself and the channeling of savings towards the financing of the development of income and employment represent essential steps, obtainable by confirming the official currency as the only legal means liberating payments and incorporating the innovations developed by data science and the computing power of computers into financial management”. In this regard, Savona continued, “an institutional distinction between the creation of money at an official level and that in the form of bank deposits would act as a starting point, reunifying the latter under the competence of financial supervision, whose activity would produce, in a position of equality, a public good complementary to that of monetary supervision”.
By doing so, “savings investment plans would also be respected and encouraged, based on the life cycle needs of individuals and their families, entrusting financial intermediaries with the task of managing them in a rational way and the bodies of democracy with deciding on a fair distribution of resources produced. If well structured and well explained, such a reform would make it possible to implement an economic policy which eases the pressure on state accounts and reduces the burden of taxation and public debt on GDP” concluded Savona who said he convinced that “In this new institutional architecture, the monetary and financial supervisory authorities would see the respective independence and effectiveness of their action strengthened and could move from a formal approach, in fulfilling the tasks assigned to them aimed at preventing and sanctioning pathological aspects of the market, to a functional approach to improving the physiological contents of real growth and, with them, individual and social well-being”.
Net of the reflections of each of us, paraphrasing the thoughts that Savona has conveyed in recent years, one might say that “it will be the market that will provide an answer” to the doubt of some critics regarding the president of Consob: crazy, visionary or misunderstood Metone ?
