Taxing the banks' extra-profits. The first risky move by Meloni government's: a well-conceived marketing device or pure improvisation?

This chapter discusses the recent sudden move (in August 2023) by the Italian executive led by Giorgia Meloni to tax the extraprofits of Italian banks, largely welcomed by the governing majority and the political opposition. Within the framework of “external constraint” (vincolo esterno) – so avoiding any conflict with European Union institutions, international organisations and alliances of which Italy is a member (including NATO, G7), or the international financial markets – the executive’s actions in the first year carefully respected this constraint, in continuity with the Draghi government, including at a foreign policy level as the Ukrainian dossier demonstrates. All this makes the tax exceptional, and its rationale – which merely sparked international investor uncertainty and stock market volatility – hard to understand. The chapter concludes that rather than a populist, well-conceived marketing device, the taxation of the Italian banks, or at least the first draft of the tax that was then subsequently downsized, was pure improvisation a likely initiative of some key but dissatisfied members of the governing majority