2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  Did you ever feel homesick? I certainly did miss Italy a little, but the 1970s were not really pleasant in my country. There was terrorism, an inflation rate that reached 20% ... Didn’t that inflation erode what your father left as inheritance? What we inherited was not very large, but enough for his three children to study.
The first time I returned to Italy in 1976 I found that the equivalent of a few hundred euros was all that remained of our inheritance. This was because the family court judge had instructed the guardian of my two younger siblings to invest the money in fixed-interest Treasury bills. And that made all the money disappear into thin air.