Abstract
From 1936 to the beginning of the 1990s, the Italian banking industry was mainly managed by the state or by local public institutions. After the Amato-Carli Law of 1990, the entire sector was rapidly privatized. The specific solution devised for privatization mirrors several features of the ancient model of the public banks of Naples that originated between the fifteenth and the sixteenth century. Most notably, not-for-profit institutions, namely the Banking Foundations, are now the main shareholders of the largest banks. This model reproduces the earlier relation between the Neapolitan charities (luoghi pii) and their offsprings, the commercial banks, and it also generates a similar stabilizing function.
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Notes
- 1.
In 2015, however, a new law required that eight Popular Banks (BPs), each with total assets exceeding eight billion euros, should be transformed into limited companies.
- 2.
The origins and nature of banking is an issue which fuels endless debates, an ‘obsession-like’ theme that earned twenty years in a US mental asylum for such a poet as Ezra Pound (‘il gran fabbro’ according to T. E. Eliot). Pound described the rise of modern banking as follows: “Rise of Banking: Banks of two sort: A. Gangs of creditors, organised to squeeze the last ounce out of debtors, conquered cities, etc. B. Reconstruction banks. The great light among which was and is the Monte dei Paschi di Siena” (Pound 1973, p. 61). Pound seems to ignore the experience of the Neapolitan public banks, parallel to Monte dei Paschi, and equally alternative to the ‘Gangs of creditors.’ The obsession with banks, usury and credit is rooted in Pound’s analysis of the origin and the governance of money (Desai 2006). “Without history one is lost in the dark, and the essential data of modern history cannot enlighten us unless they are traced back at least to the foundation of the Senese bank, the Monte dei Paschi; in other words, to the perception of the true basis of credit, viz., ‘the abundance of nature and the responsibility of the whole people’” (Pound 1973, p. 278). Pound was a follower of Silvio Gesell, the “strange, unduly neglected prophet…whose work contains flashes of deep insight” (Keynes 1936, p. 353). Gesell’s ideas (Gesell 1958) inspired the sophisticated analysis of Chapter XVII, a crucial and ‘unduly neglected’ part of the Keynes’s General Theory.
- 3.
Giuseppe Maria Galanti (1743–1806) was an economist of the Genovesi School. On behalf of the Bourbon Court, he was in charge of a general study of the economic conditions of the whole Kingdom of Naples. He published the result of his inquiry in his Nuova descrizione geografica e politica delle Due Sicilie, 1782–1791. For the accounting procedures of the Neapolitan public banks, see also Michele Rocco (1785–1787).
- 4.
It must be observed, though, that the uneven distribution on the national territory of the eighty-nine existing Banking Foundations has definitely contributed to make the Italian economic dualism worse.
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Giannola, A. (2018). Profit and Non-profit Motives in the Public Banks of Naples: An Old Model in Modern Perspective. In: Costabile, L., Neal, L. (eds) Financial Innovation and Resilience. Palgrave Studies in the History of Finance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90248-7_16
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