THE STATE PURCHASES A BEAUTIFUL EMPTY BOX: THE ITALIAN EXCHANGE

LSE wants to get rid of Borsa Italiana. Nothing scandalous: London leaves the Union, has no interest in keeping the pieces it does not need, has understood that the real business is not the management of the markets, but in the management of data and information and therefore wants to buy Refinitv from Thompson Reuters. What about a small stock market with asphyxiated growth like the Italian one?

The funny thing is that now everyone is talking about the Italian Stock Exchange as if it were a kind of strategic asset, with a lot of “Golden power” to be applied so that it doesn't end up in “Mani Straniere” and many other similar amenities. This after it was privatized and from a mutual society of stock brokers it was first of all transformed into a SPA and then sold for 25 million (read 25 million) to banks. Which, being the natural competitors of direct capital raising on the market, did little to develop it, except to sell it to LSE for 1.6 billion euros. Thanks to a law that was based on Draghi (but what a case ..) a handful of Italian banks made a good profit and even acquired an important stake in the LSE. Except not knowing how to manage it and then sell the shares on the market between 2007 and 2012, without even waiting for them to reach the values ​​seven or eight times higher reached in the last 24 months.

Today an empty object is defined as “Strategic” and its Italian character is claimed. So will you think that the Treasury will buy it, that maybe it will go back to being a mutual society among operators? Not at all, CDP enters the field with Euronext, ie the Paris stock exchange. Eventually the state again points to a foreign partner, proving that, in the end, it's just a matter of power games. In any case:

• In this phase, MTS (government bonds) and the Stock Exchange are offered separately;
• It seems that Zurich and Frankfurt are also interested, which will make the race expensive;
• long live the half nationalism of the various Villarosa etc, but once this money has been spent (which could have been spent differently….) what about the Italian Stock Exchange?

Because if in the roaring eighties there was talk of the possibility of reaching the thousand listed companies, economic crises, poor management skills, confused regulations and hostility to direct capital raising have reduced Borsa Italiana to an "Interrupted Exchange", that is, an attempt failed. If we buy Borsa Italiana to favor a handful of marginal operators and to be able to say that “We have a stock exchange”, as once “We have a bank”, then it would be better to invest this money in ILVA and more jobs would be saved. The alternative would be a serious capital market development program, but for now there is no trace. So we're seeing yet another wasted opportunity, and more money to help friends of friends of friends …

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The article THE STATE PURCHASES A BEAUTIFUL EMPTY BOX: THE ITALIAN EXCHANGE comes from ScenariEconomici.it .

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This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/lo-stato-acquista-una-bella-scatola-vuota-la-borsa-italiana/ on Tue, 18 Aug 2020 08:45:09 +0000.