It’s been almost twelve years since the last one fell Berlusconi governmenton November 12, 2011. Two days earlier, on November 9, Italians learned that the term was spreading. On that day, the spread between the yields of BTPs and Bunds, which had never exceeded 170 basis points in previous years (not even in the midst of the Lehman Brothers crisis), reached 575 points, while the yield on the 10-year Italian bond exceeded 7 %. The day before, the Berlusconi government had failed to secure a majority of the votes in parliament in the vote on the state accounts. Three days after the resignation and in the weeks that followed, the inauguration of Mario Monti’s interim government.
“A silent coup d’état”, a silent coup d’état by the European Council in technocratic language: this is how the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas dared to define it in an interview with Der Spiegel on November 25, 2011. In two years Between 2010 and 2012, the governments of Ireland, Spain, Portugal and Greece fell alongside Italy. It is the same Mario Monti On August 4, 2021, in an editorial in Corriere della Sera, he seemed to confirm this thesis by arguing: “If the government and the majority of the time had been able to implement a coherent and credible economic policy, Italy would not have the confidence lost.” “Market and government policies would not have given in to a hasty, foreign-controlled solution as they did.”
In December 2017, former Prime Minister Romano Prodi also admitted in an interview with Il Sole 24 Ore that a financial coup had been carried out against the Italian government. Markets echoed the prevailing political will to make the Italian Prime Minister pay for his position in favor of Gaddafi (ENI had billionaire deals with Libya) and in favor of Putin. According to Prodi, it was not only the macroeconomic conditions that weighed on the markets, but also Franco-German geopolitical interests.
Against this background, 2011 was a difficult year from an economic point of view. In 2010, Greece received a €110 billion loan from the IMF, the ECB and the European Commission to avoid default. The following year, fearing contagion in the European banking sector, including lending to the Greek economy, the European Banking Authority (EBA) imposed stricter capital strength requirements on eurozone banks, whose ratings had already been downgraded over exposure to government bonds of countries in trouble.
Specifically, he recommended building a higher-quality capital buffer. Accordingly cover their own budget holes Many lenders, including BNP Paribas and Deutsche Bank, reduced exposure to Italian government bonds between June and November.
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The ECB takes the lead trichet Moreover, as Peter Praet (the central bank’s chief economist) recalled later in 2015, he committed a crime that same year The mistake of raising interest rates twiceto counteract the impact of energy price hikes on inflation, which did not materialize and only further destabilized the situation.
Finally, in October 2011, there were disagreements between the countries of the euro zone over the further financing of the euro European Salva Stat Fundi (renamed Mes since 2012), which was just created to take care of loans from defaulting countries and indirectly recapitalize the big European banks in crisis, as will be the case for Spain and Banco Santander. The fund could have been useful as a buffer also for ItalyBut in the negotiations at the end of October, the overall budget could not exceed the 440 billion euro mark, a third of which had already been pledged for Greece, Ireland and Portugal.
The situation could therefore worsen and trigger the international crisis of confidence in the Italian economy. was left to his fatewithout any comforting deeds or words to the markets.
The answer that the then spokesman for the German government, Steffen Seibert, gave on October 24, 2011 to the reporter’s question about the famous ironic exchange of views between Merkel and Sarkozy at the final press conference of the European Council in Brussels is a good expression of the climate that is being breathed “The two leaders were just unsure who should answer the question first (trust the assurances from the Italian Prime Minister). France and Germany regard Italy as an economically strong country, as an important EU member and as one of our closest partners. A country with very high economic output, but which still has a high level of debt.”
A claim that is not supported by the data. If it is true that public debt was high and was 120% of GDP (today it is 145%), it is also true that in 2010 the deficit-to-GDP ratio had fallen compared to the crisis year of 2009 and remained unchanged at 4 .6%, versus 4.3% in Germany, 7.1% in France and 9.1% in Spain.
On October 26, 2011, the Italian government also broadcast a letter of assurance to the European summit, on the restrictive fiscal maneuver approved in the summer, following the recommendations of the August 5 Trichet-Draghi letter. A maneuver that went far beyond the spirit of the letter and masked Europe’s other unwritten demands: VAT increase, 3% solidarity contribution for incomes over 300,000 euros, cuts in public spending, liberalization and expected budget balance from 2014 to 2013, as demanded by Brussels. All measures that would not have been followed up, but which would have been taken up in a different form by the Monti government a few months later. If the aim of these measures was to reduce debt, that is precisely what has not happened. In 2012, with the approval of the Salva Italia decree by the Monti government, According to Istat, the tax burden in Italy increased by almost two percentage points in just one year. from 42.6 to 44%, with a cascading effect on consumption and GDP growth, which quickly turned negative, to -2.4% compared to +0.4% yoy, unlike the others European countries, which instead recorded no declines for 2012. And Italy’s public debt rose from 120.8% to 127% of GDP in just one year, and continued to climb to continue the decline until it hit 135% in 2014.
The speculative crisis of 2011-2012, before the start of quantitative easing Mario DraghiAccording to a statement from the Parliamentary Budget Office in 2017, it cost 31 billion euros in terms of higher interest on the debt.
Friedrich Magnani, June 22, 2023