With his last thoughts as governor of the Bank of Italy, Ignazio Visco prepares to leave “the ‘special’ institution which I have served, in different capacities, for fifty years”. Appointed on November 1, 2011, the Neapolitan economist, born in 1949, ends his second term this autumn: the race for succession is open, the name most cited, but not taken for granted, is that of Fabio Panetta, now in the ECB. But in a world in which “new ways of organizing work and society will continue to emerge, new styles of life, new ways of cooperating” of which “we must be aware, above all at the individual level, betting, as we have been saying for some time time, curiosity, study, knowledge”, it is in this awareness that Bankitalia “will be able to base its work also on others to come”, says the governor. “We always bear in mind the need to base assessments and decisions on the broadest and most accurate information and analysis possible”, he points out, quoting Bonaldo Stringher, “with the exclusive intention, in common, and not in disagreement, with the State, ‘to improve the conditions of national activity and improve their fortunes’.
Awareness of the need to be guided by curiosity, study and knowledge must be common, continues Visco, quoting Dante’s Convivio, ‘the Philosopher says that man is naturally a companion animal’, because “problems such as the reduction of public debt or the adoption of lifestyles coherent with the defense of the environment demand that society understand and adopt them, not because ‘Europe asks us to’, but because they protect us from risks and open up opportunities”.
However, we are not just ‘social animals’, he recalls with another quote from Yuval Noah Harari, according to which we distinguish ourselves by the ability ‘not only to imagine things, but to do them collectively’. “This ability to imagine the future will be crucial”, concludes the government official, and “it will be up to younger people, less conditioned by the past, to imagine that world, to identify their opportunities” for which “they will be heard, helped by other generations to form , without constraints, to translate into realistic interventions the schemes that will be able to develop for a future world, not poorer, but safer and fairer”.
Source: IL Tempo
Roy Brown is a renowned economist and author at The Nation View. He has a deep understanding of the global economy and its intricacies. He writes about a wide range of economic topics, including monetary policy, fiscal policy, international trade, and labor markets.
