Bank of Italy Assembly, the audience awaits Meloni at the gate: “In September the real test bench”. Panetta on pole to replace Visco

The banker who lingers in the baroque halls of the Bank of Italy after Ignazio Visco’s report ventures a question that basically tells the unsaid of the now ex-governor: “Giorgia Meloni has had an easy life so far. The testing ground of her leadership is September: I’m curious to see her at work ”. The rite of final considerations on May 31st is always the same. Blue cars that occupy the roadway of Via Nazionale, many bankers, former ministers, journalists, communicators, very few politicians. In the front row you can see Mario Draghi – among the first to leave the building quickly to avoid journalists – and Fabio Panetta, the one Meloni would have wanted to lead the Treasury and now, with almost certainty, will leave the executive committee of the European Central Bank to succeed Visco.

Those of this year were the last considerations of the most progressive governor since the days of Carlo Azeglio Ciampi. And it shows: Visco invites the government to take into consideration the minimum wage (which Meloni has already rejected), underlines the “progressive decline in per capita income compared to other advanced countries”, denounces the persistence of “very prolonged precarious conditions” in the job market. Visco repeats the word “uncertainty” several times, underlining the unexpected stability of the Italian economy in the first months of the year, but does not lean towards long-term scenarios. On Germany, for example, Italy’s most important manufacturing partner and which has technically entered a recession. Hence the question of the anonymous banker, which reflects the usual exchange of views among those present after the protocol of the ceremony.

What will happen in six months? Giorgia Meloni will withstand the impact of the combination of inflation never seen in thirty years and the return to the budgetary discipline imposed by the increase in interest rates. Luigi Einaudi, the governor who invented the rite of final considerations in 1947, resolved the problem after the war with a restrictive monetary policy, raising criticism from the left. Today the Bank of Italy takes that decision in a room with twenty other colleagues, and can at most disagree with the majority opinion. It is no coincidence that one of the more prudent passages of the report is precisely on the future trend of interest rates, which Germany and the block of Nordic countries insist on raising again.

Visco knows that the coming months, those awaiting his successor, will not be easy for the government. So all that remains is to recommend the two (only) possible solutions to Meloni: budgetary discipline and maximum commitment to the implementation of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan, the only money available to Italy to stimulate growth. “The governor’s report indicates risks that should be addressed before they turn into damage,” the president of the Banks Association, Antonio Patuelli, will say publicly. This is the question of the anonymous banker, and of most of his colleagues who hope for Meloni’s resilience more than that of the Pnrr.

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