What is behind Giorgia Meloni's pulse on Italian banks and their new tax on the sector?

“It is not a tax on a legitimate margin, but a tax on an unfair margin”. In this forceful way, Giorgia Meloni has defended the controversial bank tax unexpectedly approved by her Government on Monday night. The measure caused the collapse of the sector on the stock market on Tuesday – Italian entities left more than 9,000 million euros in value – and the Italian Executive came out to qualify the tax approach; It seemed like a complete reversal, but nothing could be further from the truth.

Throughout yesterday, the Prime Minister and her number two in the Government, Matteo Salvini, raised the pulse with the country's financial sector and focused on the entities given the increase in pressure that families and companies are enduring due to the increase in the cost of mortgages and loans after the successive rate hikes by the European Central Bank (ECB).

In a message posted on social networks, the Transalpine Prime Minister criticized banks for raising “passive interest” for customers who apply for loans but not doing the same in the case of “active interest for those who deposit their money”.. “It is essential that the banking system behave as correctly as possible,” Meloni said.

However, at the same time that it demanded the involvement of the banks, the Meloni government has put an end to the so-called Citizenship Income, a basic income approved by its predecessors that they promised to repeal in the electoral campaign and that in recent weeks has Some 169,000 families have begun to be interrupted, mostly from the south of the country. As Efe points out, the people affected are those of working age, without disabilities or dependents in their care, who will now have to carry out training programs financed by the State to promote their reintegration into the job market.

internal noise

Some analyzes point out that so many changes in the last hours are a sign of internal friction in the government coalition led by Meloni and place the ownership of the tax on the deputy prime minister, Matteo Salvini, in an attempt to appease the criticism of the most populist party. of the formation that he leads.

Salvini has in fact been the main defender of the new rate. “The sector is obtaining billions of euros of benefits without lifting a finger by virtue of the decisions of others. I think redistributing a small part is an economic and social duty,” the founder of the Northern League said yesterday.

According to Bloomberg, the agreement between the two partners to carry out the tax was discussed on Sunday night during a dinner at a restaurant near the Tuscan coast, barely 24 hours before its approval, which explains the haste and lack of tribute details.

Throughout Wednesday, after the impact of the measure on the stock markets and markets, the Government qualified some of its key points. Among others, the standard will be activated if the interest margin registered in 2022 exceeds the value of the 2021 financial year by at least 5%, a percentage that will rise to 10% if 2023 is compared with the previous year (in the first draft released , those percentages were 3% and 6%).

In addition, the Italian Ministry of Economy has been forced to limit the scope of the tax, which will have a limit that in no case will exceed 0.1% of the total assets of the entity.. This time, positive. The shares of the large Italian banks managed to recover part of the lost ground with rises that in the case of Banco BPM were close to 5.5%. Unicredit advanced 4.4%; Monte dei Paschi, 2.5% and Intesa Sanpaolo, 2.3%.

The rebound was also repeated in Spain, where BBVA and Banco Sabadell closed the session on the Ibex 35 slightly above 1%; CaixaBank rose 0.9%; Santander, 0.75% and Unicaja and Bankinter finished almost flat.