The role of the Istituto Mobiliare Italiano at the service of the Italian government's economic policy : research suggestions from the Intesa Sanpaolo Group Historical Archives

The paper deals with the role played by the Istituto Mobiliare Italiano, a public credit institution created in 1931 to finance industrial investment, as an instrument for the State intervention in the Italian economy, especially in the 25 years after the World War II. In particular, the IMI was broadly involved in the provision of subsidized credit which constituted the main instrument of economic policy to support industry from the end of the 1950s and throughout the 1960s. Various scholars have emphasised that this involvement caused selective inefficiencies in the approach and the operating procedures in the whole range of the Institute's activity, thus explaining also the difficulties the Institute experienced at the end of the 1970s. Without disputing the validity of these arguments, we argue that in fulfilling its function as a public credit institution, the IMI tried to combine the support of industry within the framework of the policy pursued by the Government, with the application of rigorous criteria in assessing the creditworthiness of industrial initiatives to be financed, as well as it pointed out to the Government authorities the negative spillovers of the subsidized credit. This effort emerges clearly in the examination of the loans granted to Pignone (then Nuovo Pignone), a Florence-based company in the mechanical sector.