TPS, a Bocconi Alumnus Serving the Common Good

A source of inspiration to "respond to this very difficult moment in Italian and European life." This is the role that Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa can still play, a month and a half after his death, according to the President of Bocconi, Mario Monti, who introduced yesterday's commemoration the University dedicated to one if its most illustrious alumni. "We look upwards," said Monti referring to the words which Padoa-Schioppa used to conclude his lecture during Bocconi's 2005-2006 academic year. "We will be able to overcome disillusionment, transforming it into a renewed commitment to offer our hopeful and positive individual contributions for a more cohesive community, a community which can look inside itself not with shame, but with pride."

Remembering Padoa-Schioppa's years at the Banca d'Italia (1968-1979 and then 1984-1997), the President Emeritus of the Republic and former Governor of Bankitalia Carlo Azeglio Ciampi said in a videoconference, WTommaso was an exemplary expression of the educated, enlightened, hard-working middle class man who was aware of his own social responsibilities and thus able to hold a vision of his role that was not parochial. An executive class which professed sobriety as a civil religion, faithful to strict morals." Europe, recalled Ciampi, was his "strongest ideal, the powerful engine of Tommaso's action, his existential characteristic, I would even say."

Jacques Delors, historical President of the European Commission and chairman of the committee who, during the late '80s, outlined the guidelines for the constitution first of the economic and monetary union and then of the euro. He recalled Padoa-Schioppa's culture and maintained that "Tommaso in Brussels was determined, in a never-ending dialectic between thought and action."

He was a spirit worthy of a founding father, which he essentially was for the euro, and he was also a man confident that he had never finished learning. This was the Padoa-Schioppa remembered by the President of the European Central Bank, Jean-Claude Trichet, who recalled a citation from Jean Monnet, dear to TPS: "When one is determined as regards the desired goal, one must act without making multiple hypotheses on the risks of failure. As long as you did not try it, you cannot state that the endeavor is impossible."

The international stature of TPS (as he was called all over the world) was remembered by Paul Volcker, former President of the Federal Reserve, who said that "without any official mandate, he became in practice Europe's ambassador to the financial world, convincing even the skeptics that the ECB and the Euro were here to stay."

"One of the most staunch supporters of Europeanism that I ever met, one of the most refined economists, one of the purist intellectuals," Romano Prodi defined him as he remembered Padoa-Schioppa's work as Minister of the Economy for Prodi's second government (2006-2008). "Growth has always been the goal of Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa's politics, but recovery has always made up a fundamental pillar in it as well (...). Recovery and development could not be separated from equality," said Prodi. "The other ethical battle that he wanted to fight during his actions as the Minister of Economy and Finance was the fight against the plague of short-term thinking which corrodes all modern democracies, but especially Italian democracy." Lastly, Prodi recalled the media storm that hit Padoa-Schioppa when he dared stress the "beauty of contributing, each to his or her own abilities, to necessary expenses for the common good," concluding that Padoa-Schioppa's teachings were "a very simple education, because simplicity is the appeal to necessary collective virtues."

An account from Padoa-Schioppa's son Camillo spoke of a man certain of his values ("The positions he held were nothing compared to the privilege of being able to contribute to the making of the euro"), an idealist (when his son asked him why public sector workers earn less than those in the private sector he answered, "If you are so lucky to work for your country, then you should be willing to make some sacrifices"), a funny man ("Having been a central banker in Italy is like having been a doctor in Africa"), but also a man embittered by the direction of politics ("I'm not sure that I will live long enough to see the end of this terrible political period").

The commemoration concluded with the moving remembrance of the President of the Republic, Giorgio Napolitano, who defined Padoa-Schioppa as a "civil servant, a servant to the public good who could not be narrowed down to the figure of a technocrat. Men and women of such deep calling and democratic training as him," continued Napolitano, "in any structure or institution operating at the national or international level, no matter how high their skills and technical tasks, know what it means to reach a limit. They know where their responsibilities stop and when they must concede to the sphere of political decisions, assumed in the name of popular sovereignty."

The audience remembering TPS at his alma mater, including acting ministers (Roberto Maroni and Giulio Tremonti), central bankers (Mario Draghi, Mugur Isarescu and Georgios Provopoulos), former heads of state (Massimo D'Alema, Guy Verhofstadt and Ernesto Zedillo) and an endless group of representatives from economics and business. Those advancing their messages of sorrow at his loss included the President of the European Commission José Manuel Barroso and the President of the Italian Senate, Renato Schifani.

The President of the Republic was presented with the first copy of a collection of editorials by Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa, edited by the Corriere della Sera Foundation.