Nobel Karman: 'Against predators we need rules'

How is the financial world reacting to these constant stop-and-go's of the American president? "Finance," says banker Pietro Modiano, "loves stability, measurable uncertainty, risks that can be covered by financial instruments, it hates instability and the arbitrariness of predators on which you cannot build financial strategies, you have to act on remittance. In short, the globalisation of the 1990s was better: growth without war. "If we look at the statistics, on the eve of the great financial crisis, between 2005 and 2004, the number of war dead was the lowest since the Second World War".

It has been mentioned that in the billionaire president's America, one man, Elon Musk, owns more wealth than 52% of the poorest American households. And the elite of America's tech oligarchs are 10 people holding $2.3 trillion in wealth. They are 10 people, not 10 companies. And they are in charge of the platforms with which we surf the Internet, communicate via email, make financial transactions. They know everything about us, all our personal data. They hold the world in their hands and they have such a powerful lobby that they fund Republicans and Democrats. So whoever gets into the White House somehow has to go along with what they think.

'The world,' Capanna notes, 'is burning because of climate change that is no longer talked about. It is burning because of the spasmodic resumption of the arms race. We have schools and healthcare in our country that are doing water but... weapons, weapons and weapons. It burns for the society of the one per cent: it means that four nabobs, the one per cent of the population, control more wealth than the 99 per cent. Then one understands Pope Francis' statement, 'This profit-driven economy kills'. The original evil of predators is profit without limits. Do we have the capacity to replace profit with the concept of fair gain?"

"When Capanna talks about profit," Modiano concludes, "he is right. Because he has not demonised profit per se but has introduced a concept that is just profit. Fair profit is not foreign to the logic of the market. In the late 1970s in the US the top tax rate for the richest was over 90 per cent. So if you earned more than necessary you were 'expropriated'. This is the logic of post-war capitalism. In Italia, the Visentini Reform of 1971 provided for a maximum tax rate of 71 per cent. Anything over a certain amount was basically expropriated. And that was the time when western economies were doing better. What we are experiencing today is unprecedented, it is a drift of the capitalist and market system that absolutely must be corrected with rules'.