Roma, 19 gen – Pinocchio taught us at his expense that the gold coin tree does not exist. Ma è davvero così? If reality surpasses fantasy, this is precisely the case. And we're not talking about a little money, but say hundreds of billions of euros. In a society dominated by money, to find the God who governs it you need to follow the money to its source: central banks. They can create money without any theoretical limits, given that the money they create is nothing more than a liability item on the balance sheet that can be expanded even with negative capital. As a result they have immense powers, which explain the incessant attempts to make these entities independent, where by "independent" we can mean “outside state control” and therefore disconnected from the mission of serving the nation, instead placing itself at the service of the most influential private economic operators.

While thousands of Italian companies are forced into bankruptcy every year, money rains on large corporations: starting from June 8th 2016 and until 19 December 2018 (still continuing to reinvest the revenues generated in these securities) the ECB via 6 central banks (including the Bank of Italy) has purchased various securities issued mostly by large multinationals. Currently holds a value of almost 180 billion. And the question that's easy to ask is: where did this money come from?? The answer, however banal, has important implications: he simply created them. While citizens were told that "there is no money", that “sacrifices must be made” and “we can't afford it”, Mario Draghi, President of the European Central Bank, he “created” money in order to finance the big names.

To name just a few, we find among the major companies in the food sector (Nestlé, Coke, Danone, Heineken, Unilever, Sodexo…), oil companies like Shell, Repsol, Gas Natural, Total e OMV, the major exponents of the "big pharma" lobby such as Roche, Bayer and Novartis, several German automotive companies (Daimler, Volkswagen, BMW…), Siemens, Allianz, Michelin, Orange, Vivendi, Renault e Louis Vuitton until you get to Hera, Terna, General, Telefonica, Deutsche Telekom, Ryanair, Adecco and many others, among which the Benetton holding company also appears, Atlantia, and Autostrade per l'Italia. The official motivation for this gigantic operation called “Corporate Sector Purchase Program" was "stimulate investments and create jobs” through a clear application of trickle theory, which is nothing more than an even more subtle version of the liberalism, where the market is not simply left free, but the bigger players with conviction are actively favored (to explain to us) what then wealth will also trickle down to those lower down.

What's more, the ECB grants these companies the privilege of being able to sell their securities already on the market primary (directly upon issue) rather than on the secondary market as with government bonds, thus privileging these corporations over the states themselves (in line with art. 123 of the TFEU) . But the mockery doesn't stop there: using the excuse of the desire to be "neutral" with respect to the market, the national quotas of securities purchased are based on the quotas of "collectible" securities present on the market. Keep case, the French ones are more than double those of Italy, and the German ones almost triple. This means that in this system not only small companies are disadvantaged compared to large ones, but even among the latter, the German and French ones are favored to the detriment of the Italian ones.

What would happen if instead of talking about generic "liquidity injections" and "quantitative easing", the media described the central bank's operations in the terms illustrated above? The entire narrative based on the dogma of scarcity would collapse, it would no longer be possible to justify the imposition of further sadistic suffering on a tortured people, and every Cottarelli or Fornero who came to talk about sacrifices because "there is no money" would be buried in laughter.

Lorenzo Fernetti