The Monti Government is like an onion . The outside layer, the most visible one, is the ECB. Thus the EU government. Remember? Just a month ago, Italy was at risk of causing the implosion of Europe, the United States, China, the whole world, if the spread were to go above 500 points with the Bund and interest rates on State bonds over 7%. Those are things that did in fact happen even with Monti, the Bocconi-guy, the man of “The Presidential Hill”, but without consequences apart from the taxes. Thus a Government of Bocconi-guys . The third layer is made up of the banks, that were at risk of seeing the tens of billions of euros worth of Italian stock purchased, becoming waste paper. Thus government of the banks , especially the French banks doped with BTP State Bonds. The fourth layer of the onion is Banca Intesa, the biggest bank in the country. Finally a Banca Intesa Government with two leaders at the very top level like Passera and Ms Fornero . Both with a very respectable CV in favour of the workers. There’s been a change from the government of Mediaset’s private TV channels to that of Banca Intesa. Nothing has changed except for the direct beneficiaries.
Beppe Scienza in his Passaparola explains to us who are Passera and Ms Fornero (nicknamed Frignero).

Intervention by Beppe Scienza, mathematician and economist

Corrado Passera, the man of the banks
I’m Beppe Scienza and I teach in the Maths department at the University of Turin. For a few years, in fact for a few decades, I’ve been dealing with savings and supplementary social security. This government, presented a bit like a government of Bocconi-guys, about whom there’d be so much to say, because on this very topic of savings and Bocconi-style supplementary social security, they keep banging on about the worst products and about the worst characters in the sector. Actually, rather than a government of Bocconi-guys, it’s more like a government of bankers and given the presence of two characters like Corrado Passera and Elsa Fornero, a government of Banca Intesa. I’m wondering whether the meetings are held at Palazzo Chigi or directly in the Milan HQ of Banca Intesa San Paolo. But this is normal. Meetings can be held anywhere. It’s policy that is truly worrying and worrying for the future. Because these characters Corrado Passera and Elsa Fornero have a past that bodes ill and they have already taken some decisions. I’m just going to deal the topics of savings and supplementary social security, that just don’t seem to be under consideration by the citizens. I want to say something about Corrado Passera, not so much about the Alitalia affair in which he definitely stuck to the line of the Berlusconi government, but to take a tiny step back. He was made Head of the Post Office in 1988 and he stayed there until 2002 and it’s true that he sorted out the balance sheet of the Post Office. I can assure you, Passera was not stupid. However, how did he sort things out? By creating Banco Posta {the Post Office Bank} The Post Offices ... If you go in you see more desks for finance than for postal products, in fact, it turns out that anyone wanting to send something by registered post or send a package, feels a bit like a fish out of water. Banco Posta has transformed the Post Office into a festival of financial products, mostly terrible ones or anyway bad ones, definitely mediocre ones, mostly getting rid of the “buoni fruttiferi postali” {post office securities} and certainly increasing revenues for the Post Office, but playing on the trust that people used to have in the Post Office, because they were used to the post office securities with which they could never lose anthing. Even now you cannot lose, because even though they are a bit flaky, not exciting, however, the post office securities continue to be the only product together with the current accounts and the bank deposits, where you can never lose what you have put in and you can take out the money any day. Instead they have been ousted. By everything and by worse stuff. That is by structured bonds, pension funds, collective investment schemes, life insurance policies. This is all stuff now sold by the Post Office, thanks to the work of Corrado Passera and his creation of Banco Posta, and thus just for this past life, things are not good. In 2002, Passera left the Post Office and went to Intesa San Paolo. Intesa San Paolo, the top Italian bank when counting the number of cash desks, perhaps it is no worse than the others, but it is certainly specialised in passing on to its customers savings and supplementary social security products that produce earnings for the bank, and not for the customer, including some tremendous things like life insurance policies that trap you for a year. You’ve got some money available and you take out a life insurance policy and for a year the money is blocked. Great. This is lovely. These are products of Intesa San Paolo and of other banks as well.
So where has Passera come from? This creates some perplexity and prospective that is confirmed by one of the first things, put about as an anti-tax-dodging regulation: the battle against cash. What is the battle against cash? It’s an old war-horse of Italian banks. For a few years, for 7 or 8 years they keep on saying that too much cash is in circulation, that we have to pay with electronic money or suchlike. These are all things that are repeated by economic journalists like parrots. Any idiot thing put out by a bank’s press office is repeated on their pages. To start with, this is not true. Even aboad, for example in Germany, there’s a very high usage of cash. A study carried out last year by Deutsche Bundesbank, the German central bank, found that 82% of purchases made by Germans, take place using cash. The German national bank finds nothing wrong with this, in fact it considers it to be logical. It says: “It is logical for small sums of money, for various things you need cash, it’s logical, no here no!” We have got to the point at which this Government has decided, then now it is going back on this in part, that pensions greater than 500 Euro are to be paid, not in cash, but as a credit on a current account. Just to think that the pensioner with a pension of 700 Euro who goes to the Post Office and takes out 730 Euro, is laundering dirty money, is a bit strange. Why is there ths battle against cash? Well, because the banks are making money on all elelctronic payments. They make money in two ways: 1)the most immediate one, the commission they get, and the commission also on the bank machines, the commission on the credit cards that can be up to 4% and in fact the Confcommercio {Chamber of Commerce} is against this prohibition on paying in cash, because every time the shopkeeper takes a payment with a credit card or using another method, a part of that goes to the banks. Then there’s another point: that the banks are happy for there to be money left in the current accounts rather than having all the banknotes in your wallet, becuse in that way they have financing that costs them nothing, because they pay no interest on the current accounts and the banks are hungry for money at this moment of crisis, and it’s difficult to get money because among other things, they don’t have the trust to lend to each other.

Fornero means trust in pension funds
The point is that when I use cash to pay in a shop, the bank gets nothing from this. I take the banknotes and give them to the shopkeeper and I pick up the goods. The bank wants to earn something even on this! Now let’s look at another character in this government, Elsa Fornero, who, as well as being a Minister, also wants to devote herself to other activities, like being an actress, specialised in tearful scenes played not too well! Elsa Fornero also comes from Banca Intesa where she was on the Supervisory Committee. Before that she was in the Compagnia San Paolo, a banking foundation and in one of its offsprings: CERP, {centro di ricerca sulle pensioni = pension research centre} near Turin, also financed by Compagnia di San Paolo. For now Fornero is busy doing a bit of killing off of pensions and pensioners. Unfortunately, I expect it’s a severe attack on the TFR {lump sum payment taken on retirement} and giving help to the parasitical supplementary social security industry. Here too we have a previous history. This includes various articles she’s written and in particular the position she adopted in the terrible semester of 2007 when, as long as you stayed silent, your TFR ended up in the pension funds. OK, in an interview on the radio on 19 January 2007, Elsa Fornero said this about pension funds and giving your TFR to the ones administering the funds: “The important thing is that we have a good market that works well, that has professional operators, that has a good law on savings, that has transparency, that also has professionalism and probity.” After everything that has happened in Italy, Argentina, Sirio, Parmalat, collective investment schemes that have been causing people to lose money since 1984, when they came into existence, we have a good market that works well, that has professionalism and probity, but that’s not all! Because then as regards the peprplexity of some listeners about the fact that perhaps putting their TFR into the pension funds could even be risky, the great economist gave a demonstration of a heartfelt invocation that is also a profound analysis of the situation, her affirmation is “You also need a bit of trust” we are at the level of the well known advertising slogan of the 1960s: “Galbani vuole dire fiducia” {Galbani means trust}! From these Ministers coming from Banca Intesa, unfortunately I’m expecting the worst for savers and in relation to the TFR, the worst for Italian workers! From a person like Elsa Fornero, I’m expecting interventions to the detriment of the TFR and in favour of that strange spurious alliance that is made up of trade unions, of categories of workers, banks, insurance companies and administrators that all in one way or another, by sucking money from the workers, are gaining from the supplementary social security, obliging the workers themselves to use their own TFR to play the roulette of the financial markets!