The Wind Doesn’t Fall – it Drops

Abstract

Excessiveness can be actually measured in many ways, but it is always time sensitive, and path dependent. As the Global financial crisis in 2008 has clearly demonstrated, excessive profits by banks in the first decade of the century were by far offset with the immense losses coming after, and the Governments were urged to grant subsidies and grants to the very same companies they overtaxed just some years before. The conclusion in this respect is that any judgment of excessiveness depends on the timespan considered. Both the Italian and the European legislator seem to have forgotten this aspect.

Keywords

• energy crisis, Windfall tax