Will We Ever Get to Retire?

What Drives Their High Profits, How to Share Them with Savers, and What’s Driving the New Round of Banking M&A Bankers are among the most disliked – and envied – people in the world: they privatize profits and, in times of crisis, socialize losses. While bailouts can sometimes be unavoidable, they can be prevented with simple rules and strong, independent regulators. And profits, too, can be shared – not through one-off taxes, but by steadily lowering costs for customers and businesses. By contrast, heavy political involvement in banking M&A risks holding back the development of capital markets and reinforcing an economy still overly reliant on banks. Four years after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, we also revisit the country’s economy and the situation of refugees in Europe, caught between the desire to stay and the hope of returning home.

A More Inclusive Education System to Prevent the Waste of Human Capital in Italy Italy is facing a tremendous waste of human capital. Hundreds of thousands of well-educated young people struggle to find jobs, and when they do, they often end up in roles that have little to do with the skills they spent years acquiring through their studies. This is a loss we can no longer afford. Each year, about 100,000 people leave our workforce. Four years ago, only one in twenty companies reported staffing shortages; today, nearly one in two can’t fill vacant positions. To address this waste, we need to start with early childhood education, improve the quality of schools by valuing teachers’ work, and establish vocational pathways in higher education. Unfortunately, we are missing the opportunity presented by the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (Pnrr) to tackle these deep-rooted problems in Italy’s education system.