Il legislatore italiano e i giochi di borsa nell’Italia liberale

Between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, stock market speculation affected both the rules of the market and the law, forcing the Italian legislator to intervene both to stem operations to the limits of legality and to adapt to a progress that required the adoption of new contracts and legal instruments. In this respect, there is much discussion about futures contracts and about "differential deals", the roots of current differential contracts. After the idea that such contracts could be assimilated to mere betting, in Italy in the 1870s special laws were promulgated on the taxation of stock exchange contracts, which were inserted in the long process of formation of the Commercial Code, promulgated in 1882. With this code we will finally arrive at the codification of a further instrument that is widely used on the stock exchange, namely “contratto di riporto” on which attention will be focused in this essay.