Before starting the post, a warning: apparently the mastodon.bida.im instance has defederated my instance, so whoever followed me from there will have to choose another instance. I simply found that, last night, all the followers of this instance had defollowed me (which is statistically impossible), and that some had contacted me from other instances saying they were sorry (so they did not take the follow from me with their own hand) . The deduction is obvious.

So no: it wasn't me who banned you, it was the instance of the popular front of Judea Bida. For those who have not understood the reference . If you want to follow me again you will have to do it from a different instance. The beauty of the fediverse is that each sysop makes its choices, the even more beautiful is that there are many sysops . I won't waste any more time: to save bandwidth I returned the block, and off we go.

Having said that, we can go and see another problem of the traditional press, namely internal contextualization. What does it mean?

I don't know if you have noticed, but in recent years in Italy everything revolves around the budget. We talk about investments only as an exceptional event, that is, as a tool “to get out of crises”, or as a “recovery”, but we don't talk about it as a continuous process that leads to building new things.

Investments, that is, seem to be something virtuous, which are made by intelligent people who see far, but not the ordinary administration of any company.

It doesn't take long to understand that this is true if you are a finance company. If you manage a financial company, the investment is made in financial terms, without building anything, and it is something you leave when you return.

If, on the other hand, you are an industry, the investment is needed to build an infrastructure that will, sooner or later, return costs, but there is no “exit”, at most there will be the next investment to modernize. It is therefore a continuous process, from which one does NOT "exit".

Similarly, investment in finance can happen, and it is limited by risk, but it can also not happen or happen without risk, as pension funds do, and therefore it is very different from what industry does. , who must keep up to date, must imagine a future (and takes the risk in any case, even if he does nothing).

However, when we talk about politics in the Italian press, we only discuss investments from the perspective that is typical of the world of finance. Investments are in fact defined as:

1. private investments
2. extraordinary investments, that is "recovery fund", "exit from the crisis", that is, as a reaction.
3. operations that serve to save additional expenses.
4. investments in the Keynesian sense, regardless of the output.

but investments are practically NEVER mentioned in the perspective of actual output: if a company that makes cars invests in electric, it is not to make ends meet in the future (which is good) but to produce cars .

On the contrary, in Italian newspapers, investment (or a hypothetical investment policy of the government) is always portrayed as investments "to get what budget". There are investments made to raise GDP, investments made to increase employment, investments made to save money from climate disasters.

But you never see investments “to produce something”. You will never see why this kind of investment is typical of industries or the world of services, but it is not what financiers do: for financiers there is only one investment, that is the one where I receive even more money.

For industry, on the other hand, the value of the industry itself also counts, that is how good the products they make are, how good they will be, how much research they do, how many markets they open. For the financier, no: he has no infrastructure, he does not make products, he does not research, he does not open markets. Throw money in a magic box and expect more in the box tomorrow.

And this is the approach you read in the newspapers: if we say that with the Recovery fund we must invest in public transport by rail, we calculate how much the economic return will be, we calculate how many passengers (because it is a survey of easy market), but no one will calculate which goods you want to transport, where, for whom.

And in the same way, it is said to invest in the rail but it is not said "let's build a railway industry", or "strengthen the railway industry". This would have a very distant return, and once an industry is built then it must be pushed forward. It does not "go out". Better to think of an investment where I throw money in a train company and then I get more: that then this is obtained at the expense of employees, or by subcontracting to foreign companies, it doesn't matter.

Why is all journalistic communication like this? Well, simple: because there are no newspapers owned by industrialists. The whole sector of the Italian press is in the hands of financiers. And the government also celebrated a financier as prime minister (who knows why among the "competent" there are never real industrialists, eh?).

the result of all this is: you see the world as financiers. And if you try to ask yourself "what does this investment produce", you are answered "savings" or "income".

But if I had asked Enrico Mattei what ENI produced, the answer would have been “chemicals”. If I had asked Agnelli he would have said "vehicles". If I had asked Olivetti he would have said "office machines". If I ask Cooks, he replies “phones, computers, consumer electronics, music”.

That is, Mattei used the money to produce chemicals. That ENI was profitable was a consequence of the fact that it was well managed. But Mattei invested to produce chemical products. Not "savings" (which also existed, producing chemistry at home), not "income" (which it also produced), not "jobs" (which it also produced), and not "growth" (which pure produced).

But today they are making you think like financiers. I'll give you an example: there are 23 billion to invest in the health system, it seems. Good. How do we invest? You will tell me "health on the territory", you will tell me "let's dismantle the semi-private system". Aha. But this is just reorganization.

But what do we want health care to produce? Um … .. let's see …

… How about producing vaccines? That doesn't sound like a bad idea, does it? Or do we still want to hope that the befana passes and you invent the national vaccine for the next covid?

But this is industrial thinking: “what do we want to produce?”.

But the world has become financialized, and when we talk about "how to invest 23 billion in healthcare", we are discussing "savings", "hiring", "cost of the pandemic versus cost of prevention", and all that . But not to produce the therapies and medicines that are needed.

This widespread mentality is due to the ownership of newspapers, which are (apart from a few pure publishers) all owned by financial funds.

the financier is the worst kind of entrepreneur possible. It does not build infrastructure, it produces nothing, it is incompetent, and in the best case it makes rich people richer. And as if that were not enough, on the ethical level it is a pig without conscience.

Putting the press into the hands of such a subhuman race was a mistake, and we see the effects. Everyone is thinking like financiers. Everyone is saying "if we invest 209 billion in the recovery fund, then the GDP goes up, the debt goes down, the interest here and the spread there". But this is not economics. It's just finance.

And Draghi is no different: he too comes from the world where the star in the sky is not the product, but the balance sheet. For Draghi it makes no sense for a company that invests for five years in order to switch from endothermic to electric motor, if for those years the balance sheets are bad. It is better to pay dividends, close the parts that make internal combustion engines and then buy Tesla shares somewhere in the world. This is, for a financier, making electric cars: buying shares of those who make them. But don't "do them".

If you want to put a dragons fan in trouble, then, one who talks about economics and finance from morning to evening, ask him the following question:

ok, let's invest 209 billion. What products and services do we produce, and on which markets do we sell them, exactly?

The answer will tell you everything.

They will tell you that they are investments, but they do not serve to produce something.

That is, if you think as an industrialist, it is money thrown down the toilet. Now your question will be “but it is better to think like industrialists or financiers”. Let's put it this way: since finance prevails over industry, 10 people own half of the world's wealth, social elevators are at a standstill, employment is collapsing.

You see.