Rome, 12 mag (Velino) - More bad news on the state of the Italian economy, with a public debt clearly out of control, despite the repeated statements by the outgoing government to the very last day in office. As we warned quite a few times, a communiqué by Bank of Italy had remarked a clear growth in the absolute value of public debt in January at 1621.44 billions but the figure has now reached 1,623.66 billions at the end of February, some thirty billions higher than at the end of 2007 and not far from the all time high of 1,629. All this means that we are far above that 104 per cent of Gross Domestic Product indicated as one of the successes of the centre left government, in the framework of the so called “curing” of the economic disease of the country. Not only it’s the second consecutive month of growth, as stressed by the Central bank, but all in all public debt has now recorded a 1.5 per cent growth of 1.5 per cent against February 2007. It is not just a simple question of an obviously negative figure which makes a real recovery even more difficult: such a higher figure makes servicing public debt a real nightmare for the new Economy Minister Giulio Tremonti. If the interests burden was calculated around 73 billion a year, in the words of former Minister Tommaso Padoa Schioppa, Mr Tremonti will have to find some 75 billions a year. In contrast, according to the Bank of Italy report, in the first quarter of the year State revenues grew to 85.634 billion Euro a neat 8.65 per cent more than in the same period in 2007 (in March 26.461 billions with a 4.57 increase over the same month last year).

But while revenues are growing in the short period, the trend looks quite worrying to economists, especially since the growth expectations for the year do not go over 0.3 per cent if we are lucky. A surge in productivity would be needed, but the latest figures – published today – give no hope at all. In March industrial production went down 0.2 per cent over the previous month and was 2.5 per cent less than on annual basis, far more than predicted by analysts. In February it had been falling the same 0.2 on a monthly basis, but only a 0.7 per cent year over year. No surprise then if the latest ISAE confidence survey – again published today – signals very low confidence all across the board, and falling. If you look at the various sectors of productivity one of the most striking figures is the one from the car industry, with a very serious decline of 9.2 per cent on an annual basis, according to the figures published by Istat. In the middle of all this figures, Milan’s Stock Exchange was recording a positive trend, but only around 0.23 per cent in the afternoon, while Paris CAC was up 0.67 per cent, Frankfurt’s DAX 0.64 per cent and the London FTSE 100 was gaining 0.51 per cent. One of the stars was Mediaset, up 3.78 per cent in anticipation of tomorrow’s publication of its result. Other shares with the same level of appreciation were Pirelli (up 3.69 per cent, as a sign of operators satisfaction for the good results) and Telecom Italia (up 2.85) after a positive appraisal by the Deutsche Bank rating, upgrading TI shares to “buy”. Again on a negative trend bank shares with Monte dei Paschi di Siena losing 0.83 per cent and Unicredit 0.72.