PNRR and ReArm, but the real revival of the economy comes from investing in our best companies

'Cement and trowel and the economy flies'. This has been the somewhat simplistic conviction of our politicians over the decades, who, when it comes to reviving the national GDP, relapse, causing inflationary flare-ups and leaving behind mountains of debt, as happened with the '110%' rule that drove up the prices of every material and building intervention, generating an enormous liability. But even the articulated PNRR, for the quota destined for technological upgrading, rather than being reflected in the income prospects of the most modern Italian companies, is currently sensitive in the prospective orders of builders and installers: for now still 'cement and trowel' for the Italian economy.

Will we then be able to start a positive flywheel for the national economy when, once the 'concrete boxes' with ventilation and fire-fighting systems are finished, we will have to implement the technological contents, installing and activating the mega data centres? Or will we only end up seeing the passage of hundreds of billions to buy technologies from the usual foreign ITC giants? Even Italian 'system integration' companies, with the professional skills needed to set up American servers or software, have for some years now mostly ended up in the hands of non-domestic private equity funds, ready to extract profitability and value from them when the eldorado driven by the PNRR starts. Just a few remain forgotten on the stock markets, despite their fundamentals and potential, and are increasingly being pushed to become the object of the next takeover. Not to mention the energy bottleneck looming on the horizon: the very large CEDs will need power, resulting in imported fuels to power our thermoelectric power plants, which are still complemented by renewable energies, whose storage needs expose us once again to huge purchases of non-domestic technologies.

And while we are asking ourselves these questions, we are adding to the debate on the hundreds of billions ReArm Europe programme as an exception to the stability pacts. A project that is still not very detailed, but is considered existential especially by the Germans who intend to launch a sort of Rooseveltian new deal, in an attempt to redirect towards new outlets the national carpentry and mechanical engineering industry that is caught up in a crisis that is distressing the landers. Support for the programme seems to unite the Union's chancelleries in Brussels, but then finds a thousand distortions conditioned by the distrustful sensitivities of the citizens of the various countries. ReArm Europe is the child of fear fuelled by the drama of the Russia-Ukraine conflict that is biting the nations of Eastern Europe and spreading with contagion indices that are fading in the west/south-west areas, even though the centre of gravity of the European Union seems to have taken wide strides eastwards from Greenwich and today tends emotionally to position itself towards Vilnius.

Trying to cool tempers, we have to take note that defence, understood as a system of protection and deterrence, today needs satellite communications, aerospace and cybernetic technologies, more than tracked and armoured trucks. We therefore await the declination of the European rearmament (or defence) plan to really understand what it intends to finance. But from the Italian experience on how cement and trowel have never made the tricolour economy fly, allow us to suggest to our Central European friends not to fall into a similar error trusting that 'metal and hammer from decline offer you an umbrella'.

In Europe we must invest together in modern technology that will make us truly secure and independent, and avoid extending the shadow of irrational fear and the burden of indiscriminate debt on the shoulders of our children. We first in Italy could act without even issuing public debt, simply favouring the linking of our savings with indigenous enterprises, going directly to support our best companies on the stock exchange lists. Today, instead, by joining open-end securities funds, obsessed with daily liquidity indexes, we end up supporting investments of hundreds of billions of euro at very high multiples in large non-domestic companies, financing the development of technologies that are then sold to us at a high price, or that come to buy at a discount our best companies mortified on the stock exchanges or prepared by small-scale domestic private equity for sale to the highest foreign bidder. Defending ourselves means guarding our borders, but above all enhancing and developing the champions of the indigenous economy, returning to Italy to invest in our excellent companies, preventing the extraction of their ability to perform from our ecosystem to the benefit of non-national conquerors who do not arrive with their bayonets from the east, but come to do and shop from everywhere.