The Italian Constitutional Protection of Savings and the «New» European Paradigm

The investor protection framework in European financial law has evolved over the years towards a protection of means, increasingly treating investors as consumers of financial products. The article 47 of the Italian Constitution and its prevailing jurisprudence, however, have been left to inertia. The vacuum left by the Constitutional Court, which has never pronounced itself on the end goal of article 47 in light of the evolution of how people save and invest since 1940s, has de facto led the jurisprudence to extend the protection under article 47 for static savings (i.e. the accumulation of savings in risk free assets, such as saving accounts or local currency government bonds) to dynamic savings (i.e. risky investment decisions, such as the purchase of stocks in or bonds in a private company). We argue that this goes wellbeyond the intent of the Constitutional fathers, who wanted to provide strong protection for saving accumulation rather than risky investment decisions