They do these things differently in Italy, and despite the fact that the boom is at last beginning to fall, and every Italian politician you’ve ever heard of, and hundreds that you haven’t, are now facing corruption charges, they’re still fiercely proud of their black economy, which enables them to claim that their gross domestic product is greater than that of the UK – so much so that they even have a name for it, il sorpasso: we hear that one new piece of merchandise circulating on the black economy is IBM Corp’s internal price list for its unpriced mainframes, which was allegedly issued to some of the IBM Italia SpA sales force by mistake.
