Ignazio Visco: Conference in memory of Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa
Introductory remarks of Mr Ignazio Visco, Governor of the Bank of Italy, at the Bank of Italy
conference in honour of Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa, Rome, 16 December 2011.
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I am very grateful to all of you for being here today for this conference in memory of
Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa. I am glad that we have been able to bring together so many of
his colleagues and friends who down through the years had the fortune to appreciate his
intellectual and human qualities. And I am especially glad that we are gathering here at the
Bank of Italy, the institution where he spent a good part of his professional life and the
environment in which he first built an international reputation. An institution that, like the
others he worked in, he helped to forge and to which he always remained deeply attached.
For many of us Tommaso was more than a colleague; he was also a friend and a mentor.
You could always count on his advice, his ability to anticipate and find concrete solutions to
problems. Conversation with him was always enlightening; you benefited from having your
ideas challenged, you sharpened your reasoning, you learned, from his example, how to
deliver results. In the year since his untimely death I have often missed his wisdom and
acumen, his lucid vision of the road ahead, and I have often found myself trying to guess
what his advice would have been at a time when we face so many difficult challenges in Italy,
his native country, and Europe, the ideal to which he devoted much of his life.
Tommaso was devoted to his country and was always conscious of its great potential. But
his innate optimism did not blind him to its serious weaknesses or to the troubles that lay
ahead. He considered Italy a country suffering from a grave illness: twenty-five years of
healthy growth after the Second World War had been followed by two decades of growth
achieved with "toxic stimuli": "a combination of inflation and currency devaluation,
deficitfinanced public expenditure, accumulation of debt and impoverishment of capital".1 The result
was a country at once heavily indebted and under-capitalized, growing too slowly, where
social inequalities were bound to increase. With his writings, speeches and actions, as
Minister for the Economy he sought to instil a sense of urgency in an often hostile political
environment: it was vital to act immediately and simultaneously for stability, growth and
social equity. A sense of urgency, I must say, much vindicated by recent events.
The underlying problem, in his view, was that Italy had lost the ambition to excel. As he put it
so vividly, "Italy is like a cyclist who is capable of extraordinary sprints to catch up with the
group, but incapable of taking the lead or breaking away. It seems that only the anguish of
lagging behind and the nightmare of being excluded enable us to summon up the energy and
the will to do our best."2
Well, once again we are at a point where it is imperative to demonstrate our determination to
react to an emergency; but it is also time to take, as Tommaso used to say, a longer-term
view of the problems of the Italian economy and to tackle the structural impediments to
sustained growth.
With regard to Europe too, in his last years Tommaso saw his fears materialize, with alarm
and some bitterness. Although he is rightly considered one of the architects of the euro, he
sensed from the very start that the single currency was an unfinished project. He was among
the first to warn of the dangers of a "currency without a State". He was deeply dissatisfied
with the political inertia that had followed the introduction of the single currency. He clearly
perceived the risks posed by inadequate governance in the macroeconomic field, in financial
regulation and supervision, and by a union that "failed to satisfy, even for the functions that
have been attributed to it, the cardinal principles of western constitutionalism (balance of
powers; the democratic vote; the majority principle)".3 He pleaded unflaggingly for a closer
political Union.
Tommaso was not an academic economist. He had a special gift for using insights from
theoretical economics to challenge received ideas and established practices. At the same
time, he challenged academic economists to go beyond simplistic behavioural assumptions
and to take the role of institutions fully into account.
Institutions and their design indeed constituted a leitmotif in his thinking, whether in
connection with central banking, market infrastructures, European integration or global
monetary arrangements. He always stressed the need to clearly identify the nature and
scope of the public good that needed to be provided in order to design the most suitable set
of rules and institutional framework case by case. At the same time, he had a dynamic view
of issues and institutions: only by looking at underlying economic trends could one predict
which new demands would drive the evolution of institutions in the future.
Thus, for example, a fundamental insight of his - from early on in his career as an economist
and, let me add, as a political scientist - was that growing economic and financial integration
and interdependence, both in Europe and at the global level, would inevitably require a
profound rethinking not only of how to allocate policy-making responsibilities but of the very
concept of national sovereignty. He certainly did not underestimate the difficulty of this
process or the resistance it would meet.
Like Jean Monnet, Tommaso was fond of quoting the words of the Swiss philosopher
Henri-Frédéric Amiel: "Experience starts over with every individual. Only institutions become
wiser, as they accumulate the collective experience." We can only add that institutions lucky
enough to have had public servants as clear-minded and far-sighted as Tommaso
Padoa-Schioppa really have had a chance to become wiser.
To conclude, Tommaso's example is a constant source of inspiration, a model of the kind
described in one of his favourite quotes from Machiavelli:
"A wise man ought always to follow the paths beaten by great men, and to imitate those who
have been supreme, so that if his ability does not equal theirs, at least it will savour of it. Let
him act like the clever archers who, designing to hit the mark which yet appears too far
distant, and knowing the limits to which the strength of their bow attains, take aim much
higher than the mark, not to reach by their strength or arrow to so great a height, but to be
able with the aid of so high an aim to hit the mark they wish to reach." [Machiavelli, The
Prince, translated by W. K. Marriott (1908), Chapter 6]
We have decided to commemorate Tommaso by taking his ideas as a starting point to
discuss some of the burning economic issues of today's real world, an approach, I believe,
he would have appreciated. We have prepared four background notes, one for each session
of the conference, to summarize his thoughts and legacy on each of the four themes that
were at the centre of his work: monetary policy and payment systems, financial system
regulation and supervision, the process of European integration, and the reform of the
international monetary system. I think that the notes give ample testimony of the depth and
vitality of his contribution.
Before the panel discussions, however, we will have the pleasure of being addressed by
Italy's Prime Minister, Professor Mario Monti, whom I thank warmly for confirming his
acceptance of our invitation in spite of his many pressing engagements.