Italian government bonds riskier than the Greek ones. This time the Troika is up to us?

Will Italy be the new Greece? Behind the famous joke "a face, a race" between the two shores of the Mediterranean comes a current and surgical reflection. The overtaking of Greek government bonds at ten years old over Italian ones opens up an ambiguous and disturbing scenario, certainly repeatedly told in the past (in truth not by all) but never really metabolized by the country's ruling classes.

The Greek titles they are less risky than Italian ones: here the confidence in our country decreases significantly, while the public debt that everyone promises to scissor remains dramatically heavy and increases with macabre constancy. The point of fall will be a new troika?

The starting point is not alone the current maneuver, which in any case will not help either tax revenues or growth, but the historical flaws of Italy that are not really at the center of the governments' agenda, since nobody has ever healed them in the last four decades. Before the Greece risked collapse in 2012, it must be remembered that he had a series of impressive structural deficiencies. There was no IT system for tax collection, nor for the simple issue of railway tickets (the loss of tax revenue in 2015 was one billion a month): robberies and evasion were untold levels given that the receipts and receipts were a chimera; some pensions of ordinary civil servants such as middle managers or teachers touched on the 2,500 euros; stock market games mingled with easy access to credit, with citizens, students and employees who were invited to take a prepaid credit card to spend the summer holidays or to buy a car. Gasoline a 80 cents favored the proliferation of off-road vehicles, as well as the rain incentives for farmers in the city of Larissa saw the European record of Porsche Cayenne.

It's still. The reductions and reductions were the order of the day, as were certain embarrassing salary bonuses, the famous case of a public employee who received an extra token to go up two floors of his office, in a job called "extraordinary", or the standard in the Constitution that allows shipowners not to pay taxes in Greece; the pensioners only 45 years old, a legacy of squandering initiated by the Socialist administration Giorgios Papandreou in 1985; the defense sector purchases managed with little caution, like the German submarine arrived in Greece with a broken rudder, and the expenses for the Athens Olympics 2004 rise three times as much as in London.

IS at the end the absence of an industrial fabric that would produce the country some useful product, with the consequence that Greece imported and imported practically everything, including that copious cotton present in the country. That is the result of a lack of planning, the absence of an industrial policy, clear measures of a welfare mold, and breaking titles held by French and German institutions, which led to the bankruptcy of seven years ago. The list is long, as I wrote in my pamphlet Greek hero of Europe (Aletti 2014), translated into Greek from the Foreign Ministry.

What does Italy have to do with it? It is quite clear how our country is structurally different from Greece, in terms of history, GDP, consistency, businesses and volumes. But there are worrying points of contact, like the public debt, reached this year at 134% of the GDP, the unresolved industrial crises, the tax evasion that cannot be combated, preferring to bite the weakest, the castes of closed professions which then yield other "new" professions where the absence of rights stands out, a trade union action that is it was bland and non-resolutive of the problems of all (companies and workers).

Let us ask ourselves: if a tiny part of European GDP, the Greece that is worth it 0.5%, in order not to declare bankruptcy, he had to face tear and blood sacrifices with the troika's austerity policies, what could happen to Italy if things were to fall? The debate is open and it would be really desirable for it to be structured a reflection, serious and thoughtful, by companies, institutions and citizens. Not to wake up one fine day and watch passive to an unpleasant surprise.

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