“Tell me what you see from there” (Solferino) is released on 7 April in bookstores and newsstands: thriller, autofiction, essay, incendiary pamphlet, the book of the financier and writer (signed with the collective I Diavoli) peers into the liberal drift after the disappearance of the economist Federico Caffè
Rome. Night. A man wanders through the deserted streets and squares of the capital, among the monumental shadows of the ruins. Nobody’s around: pandemic? Curfew? Economic crisis? End of the story? All valid hypotheses. What is certain is that the city, empty and gloomy, is the ideal backdrop for someone on the hunt for ghosts. That someone is Guido Maria Brerafinancier and writer, former author of books such as And the Devils e Everything is shattered and dancing (with Edoardo Nesi) who better than all the others have told the economic crisis and its reasons; the ghost, on the other hand, is that by the economist Federico Caffèwho disappeared under mysterious circumstances in 1987: a symbolic exit from the scene, almost an announcement of the defeat of his school, the Keynesian one, to the advantage of the neo-liberal one, now dominant.
The atmosphere is that of a thriller, and in some ways it is inevitable: the global situation is such as to shake the legs to anyone who is really aware of it. Moreover, in the writing of Guido Maria Brera, the rhetoric of those who criticize it for bias is absent but has only seen it work from afar: the voice of Brera has the sharp and ineluctable hardness of those who have observed it from the inside. , personally inhabiting its nervous and circulatory systems, global finance. Also for this Tell me what you see from there (Solferino) is much more than a tense financial-themed novel: autofiction, theory fiction, scholarly essay, popularization text and incendiary pamphlet merge here in a single hydra, which hurls itself with indomitable ferocity against an economic system that has not kept its promises for too long; against a globalization that has filled us with cheap gadgets in exchange for the loss of our rights as workers; against a finance that has stopped bringing funds where there are ideas to twist on itself.
These are positions that are not expected from someone like Guido Maria Brera, who in global finance was formed, lived and experienced success. But it is precisely the pulpit from which the warning comes that gives him so much strength, and for that matter Tell me what you see from there And also a memoir: the story of a man who for a long time woke up with the markets and went to sleep with them, and if the Gordon Gekko of Wall Street taught us that “Money never sleeps”you can guess how little Brera slept. Tell me what you see from there it is in fact also a nocturnal novel, sleepless, a kind of Great beauty in a dark and ruthless key: the song by De Gregori from which the title is taken speaks all too clearly: “And I see the thieves bragging and the innocent trembling” … Here is what Brera sees today in his book, and he does not hesitate to immediately identify the paradoxical crux of the situation in which the world finds itself : «At the end of the decade», he writes, «the fall of an empire took place. That of the bad guys. The empire that with its existence had made possible, in the West, the welfare state, the social market economy, the welfare state. Without the Soviet Union, all this no longer had a reason to exist. There was no need for a compromise, since there was no longer the enemy capable of embodying the radical alternative. Thus the West had free rein to consume its counter-revolution ”.
The crisis of social democracy would therefore correspond, from an economic point of view, to sunset of the Keynesian paradigm, and of that “responsible” economy oriented towards the collective good represented by Caffè and his school, whose heirs, moreover, are victims of a real curse: in March 1985, Ezio Tarantelli is assassinated by the Red Brigades; May 1986, Franco Franciosi dies of cancer; November 1986, Fausto Vicarelli dies in a car accident. The Keynesians fall, and with them the possibility of imagining a Capital at the service of collective development falls.
Of all the distortions of globalization, perhaps the greatest is the neglect of real cost economy: the prices of certain goods are lowered, the cost of labor falls, e the planet is paying the price, which in such a paradigm is only a place to be looted or used as a landfill. Here then begins to rebel, with a climate emergency that is only just beginning, and a pandemic that has already shown that it can block the global gear – and Brera is adept at illustrating this latter process with concrete examples, which show how the interconnection of everything with everything also makes the entire apparatus extremely vulnerable.
Nor does the future look bright: among the most impressive things of the post-pandemic (if ever we really are) there is undoubtedly the lack of reactivity of the world-system and of individual nations in allocating funds to public health, as would be logical. Brera goes down hard, in no uncertain terms: «For decades crows have been circling over this building, the same ones that tear up shreds of the National Health Service. They have been populating our country for forty years. Their feathers are a severe black like austerity. They peck at public health, feast on its fragility as on a carcass, cut, demolish, flake. Instead of investing, they are cutting down the numbers of healthcare costs, personnel, intensive care places. So did everyone, even the heirs of the largest Communist Party in the West, struck by the “third way” of Giddens and Blair. 37 billion: this is the calculation of the shreds stolen from the National Health Service in the decade 2010-19 “. Why did this happen, why is all this happening? Perhaps, Brera suggests, why the offer of a different paradigm is missing, of a vision of the world that rethinks the economy as a possible instrument of collective salvation; the hope, then, lies in the fact that such a vision already exists, and perhaps we still have time to recover it, starting to rediscover, if not his ghost, at least the memory of Federico Caffè and his thoughts.
The volume and the author
The novel “Tell me what you see from there” (Solferino, pages 192, and 16.50; on newsstands and 14.50 plus the price of the “Corriere”), written by Guido Maria Brera, is out in bookstores and on newsstands on Thursday 7 April with the collective I Diavoli. Born in Rome in 1969, Brera founded the Kairos Group in 1999 with two partners. Several times one of the best hedge managers in Europe, today he is head of investments of the Kairos Group Julius Baer. In 2014 he published the novel «I Diavoli» (Rizzoli), from which a successful television series was based and aired on Sky with Patrick Dempsey and Alessandro Borghi. Later he wrote with the Edoardo Nesi Strega Prize “Everything is shattered and dance” (La nave di Teseo, 2017). The I Diavoli collective is a narrative laboratory that experiments with different forms of writing.
April 3, 2022 (change April 3, 2022 | 22:38)
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