Def, growth towards +0.6%. First estimate halved

In the new Public Finance Document expected tomorrow afternoon at the Council of Ministers, the Italian growth forecast by the government for this year should stand at +0.6%. The estimate, anticipated yesterday by the Askanews agency, has not yet been officially confirmed by the MEF, but it is in line with the calculations released last week by Confindustria and Bankitalia. And it would represent a sharp halving of the +1.2 per cent planned by the government in October in the structural budget plan, limiting by a couple of decimals the first hypotheses circulated a dozen days ago on the update of the official public finance data.

The work on the numbers was surrounded by headwinds that preceded the launch of the US tariffs and then turned into a gale with the official announcement of the tariffs and the table shown by US President Donald Trump in the press conference in the Rose Garden with which he swept stock indices from Tokyo to Wall Street via the European stock markets.

However, the numbers that will be contained in the new Document only take account of all this in part, for unavoidable technical reasons. Because on the macroeconomic framework of the Public Finance Document, as every year, a confrontation developed between the Ministry of the Economy and the Parliamentary Budget Office, on models that had been working for weeks. The result would eventually bend to the less ambitious assumptions with a choice, difficult to avoid in the climate of these days, which may also act as a mini-buffer to mitigate the risks of any further surprises in the future. Even the updated number will therefore still be surrounded by the classic 'predominantly downside risks' that are the now customary corollary of macroeconomic estimates in these complicated times.

In any case, the projected line for Italian growth is expected to travel lower than expected in 2026-27 as well, hovering around +0.8-+0.7 per cent, whereas in October a +1.1 per cent was attributed to next year.

Another clarification is obligatory: as indicated by the majority resolution approved last week in Parliament, the scenario outlined in the Document will be 'tendential at current legislation', and will therefore not take into consideration any expansive measures that the government might put in place in the near future to counter the current macroeconomic slowdown: measures, moreover, that are still to be constructed, and complicated to bring forward in a framework that currently does not contemplate exceptions to the fiscal constraints that have just come into play with the reformed EU economic governance. Just last Saturday, in his speech in Cernobbio, Economy Minister Giancarlo Giorgetti wanted to put on record the need to evaluate the general suspension clause of the EU Pact (Article 25 of Regulation 2024/1623) to allow countries to draw funds from the public budget to support the companies most affected by the trade war.