Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [112]
They are, rather, talking about the institutional structures that make such collusion feasible in the first place. They are complaining about the absurdity of being asked for collateral when the whole point of taking out the loan is to try to create a more independent small business in the first place. Most Romans rent rather than own the properties in which they live and work, and few artisans are wealthy enough to start out in life as the proprietors of their workplaces.' The banks' policies, and the illegal practices of some of their officials, drive many poorer and less propertied Romans, first to try their luck with legitimate lending agencies that offer legal interest rates, and then with the "stranglers." A contributory cause is the fact that debts to the state agency (Inps) under which they are registered for social service payments are subject to rapidly compounded interest, which can go as high as 300 percent per year, payable after the first two months of delay. The artisans' reluctance to engage with the state authorities, whose punitive interest can itself be responsible for their ending up in the red and therefore being rejected by the banks, also puts them at a further disadvantage; many do not realize that they can pay in installments if they can demonstrate a temporary lack of liquidity.
The artisans' association already mentioned, recently created and with its base in Monti, developed a program of care ~tutela~ for artisans trying to deal with these economic difficulties and at risk of falling into the usurers' hands. The ambitious president thought that a workers' cooperative with an internal credit system might offer a just and workable solution. His goal was to create a group of consortia that would be financed by a bank, so that the bank would not have to accept direct responsibility for the loans to individual artisans but would be covered by the cooperative instead; eventually, since many an artisan with able hands "is mentally confused," he said, those who were unable to organize their finances so that they could repay the loans in cash might opt for a practical alternative: to surrender some of their products to the appropriate consortium for sale to the wider market to which the consortium itself would certainly have direct access. In proposing these schemes, however, he faced an uphill struggle against a deep skepticism on the part of Monti artisans; and he seems unlikely ever to persuade the majority of the viability of his scheme.
Tactful Silences
The porous fabric of national and regional institutions, and especially of banks, favors the refraction of a supposedly universal financial ethics through the privacy afforded by a multiplicity of local special interests and sufferings. One electrician argued that the banks simply did not want any truck with unimportant customers: "If you want a billion it's easy to get the loans; if you want ten thousand, the banks won't give it to you!" Banks demand collateral in the form of real estate or a guaranteed state salary; artisans usually have neither.
The institutional framework, moreover, favors the alleged collaboration between bank managers and usurers. Privacy laws, designed to protect citizens' interests from the predations of state and business alike, in practice also favor such secret dealings and make their exposure all but impossible. In the sense that a banker has access to private information, as priests have access to secrets through the confessional, there is also a strongly felt parallelism between the actions of the financial establishment and those of religious authority. Bank managers are routinely moved from post to post every few years, which suggests that at least some of their institutions are aware of the temptations they face but would prefer to avoid confronting individuals; this seems to parody the situation of clergy operating in a system of subsidiarity that allows each to ignore the actions