Interview of TICC President on Bangkok Post
From Life section, Bangkok Post of 1st September 2011.
‘The problem with capitalism is shared inequality, and the problem with communism is shared poverty, I read once,” says Lino Geretto, president of Thai-Italian Chamber of Commerce (TICC).
The problem is no problem when you look around to notice two squatting labourers working on another skyscraper or warming themselves around a fire.
Then you turn around and away, there’s a skytrain to catch.
When the economic crisis came to Italy, I had to face the borse, the Italian word for stock markets and handbags.
There you store extra money. Big and safe as Mary Poppins, messy and hardly generous in what you need in needy times, promising a long life at a bargain price and bursting on the way home, to buy your home.
This time the seams couldn’t contain Italians’ heavy expenses, and my country was left without a stitch on.
Meanwhile, others were in stitches at our cultural waste and intellectual waste, who played peekaboo at the Brandenburger Tor and shouted too loudly at Buckingham Palace.
Italy has burst, or hasn’t it? Are the stitches holding together?
The Italian government recently approved an austerity package worth more than 45 billion euros, with the promise to cut the towering 120%-of-GDP public debt.
Geretto said: “We are still acting as a child sticking his finger in a dam, running from hole to hole to stop the leaks.”
The Italian financial system reacted well to the 2008 subprime crisis because it wasn’t overexposed to international financial institutes.
The economy thus proved to be solid in the general climate of the crisis, but our leadership has failed to respond with genuine structural changes to two economic problems which had been present before: public debt and lack of economic growth.
The austerity measures were needed because Italy must repay its debts. But it is insufficient to inject money into the economy by taking it from somewhere else.
Looking at the whopping roller coasters drawn by European indexes, Italy is sometimes included among the PIGS, the voracious European nations comprising Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain.
However, its bond market is liquid and internally financed for the most, and the country measures low levels of private debt that prove the lasting credibility of the world’s 7th largest exporter.
Mr Geretto added: “German exports grew by 17.7% in the first semester, and Italy closely followed at 17%. Italy still counts, and there is no interest to make it default.”
But the austerity package brings 1,700 euros of debt to each family a year, and touches the welfare without any preconditions for the future. I wonder what will happen to the unemployed or the family living on 1,000 euros a month.
Pensions, tax reliefs and regional contributions are to be cut; taxes, age of retirement and sanitary expenses are to be raised; it is the usual neoliberal spin in the age of credit cards and capital sprees.
Geretto said: “I think the crisis is an opportunity to look at ourselves: everybody is cutting costs, reviewing national budgets, re-engineering or re-structuring the workforce market.”
So far, the Italian government has failed to include the private sector. It has failed to single out the exceedingly productive sectors and tax them in a spirit of solidarity to reduce the public debt.
We need a bottom-up reform of the labour market: society struggles to grow, youth unemployment is at almost 30%, and if people have nothing to eat, criminality increases and counteracting and negative effects will bring a wider degeneration of the social fabric.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicholas Sarkozy recently talked about the creation of a European government and finance ministry to contain and control national debts, to supervise national economies and budgets, and to coordinate policies on the international level.
“There was a big battle of ideas and at the end there were neither winners, nor losers, nor ideas,” wrote Stefano Benni, Italian writer and journalist.
I believe in Europe because I am European. It is a sentiment of belonging that has little to do with patriotism, and more with principles and actions.
For example, placards around Dublin remember the years of the Celtic Tiger and how the European Union has partly financed roads and buildings through the National Development Plan (NDP).
Europe is a normative power based on the idea of empowerment, rather than power over; it is the principle of humanism, and that of democracy practised in international politics.
If power to Brussels means healthier economies sharing ideas would be a good start and if power to Brussels means empowering national states, so be it.
Here in Thailand, if power to the people means healthier economies chewing away widening gaps would be a good start and if that means power to all Thai people, so be it.
But you can turn around and fold the paper, there’s a skytrain to catch.
Written by Lucia Pivetta.