Acceso usuarios
Tobias Scheib
Starting in the late 1960s, the capital structure of Italian companies got heavily tilted towards debt. In explaining this development, the paper advances two interconnected topics. It contends that through active policy-making, business and state financial circuits were increasingly amalgamated. During the stagflation crisis of the 1970s and 80s, the dire straits of companies were associated with an increase in the savings rate of private households. Due to the architecture of the separated banking system, a gap between savings and investments was observed: due to the decreasing trust in the sustainability of companies and the rising inflation, savers did not engage in long-term obligations. This situation was to be overcome through a proactive state intervention, firstly via the extension of subsidized credit schemes, later via the intermediating role of treasury bills, so that private investments increasingly relied on public support. Consequently, the incentive structure in corporate decision-making strongly favoured external capital. Nevertheless, the archival material from the Bank of Italy, the business association Confindustria and the protocols from the Senate show that this solution was never truly preferred. As a second subject, the paper shows how from early on decision-makers engaged in discussions about a re-enforcement of the market for equity capital. This led to a process of policy-reconfiguration during the 1980s, which foreshadowed the institutional reforms of the early 1990s. In this vein, the new, source-based perspective allows for a reassessment of state action patterns in a phase of economic transformation and helps to analyse the Italian varieties of capitalism under historical contingency.
