Italy

Sweden’s Anders Borg (Fraser’s favourite finance minister) is wrong, says Citigroup. Bondholders and deposit holders are not like wolves, as Borg has made them out to be. They’re more like sheep — and currently they’re baa-a-a-cking out of the eurozone pretty quickly. We all know that money’s leaving the Continent — but how much and how rapidly? Citi’s credit strategist Matt King, basing his analysis on imbalances in TARGET2 (the euro area’s main payment settlement system) relative to eurozone countries’ current accounts, has come up with a few interesting observations. — Since mid-2011, Spain has suffered private-sector outflows of €100 billion, and Italy €160 billion (or a tenth of their

The Prime Minister, we are told, has been trying to reach the King of Jordan to see if some kind of arrangement can be made so that Abu Qatada can be deported legally and that no forms of torture-gained evidence will used against him in a Jordanian court. This seems like a sensible thing to do. But it is important that the government balances its counter-terrorism policy with its foreign policy.   Here is what I mean. Jordan is a friend of Britain, but the King is under tremendous pressure to reform. There are daily demonstrations against his rule and the protests are gathering pace. His reforms, meanwhile, have been

If it was not all so serious, the efforts to save the single currency would be worthy of a comic opera: the Germans could compose the score, the Italians could write the libretto, and the French could take care of the stage directions. The latest IMF-related effort is, perhaps, best described by the website ZeroHedge, which is required reading during these troubled times: “Germany will be responsible for €41.5 bn, France at €31.4 billion, and Italy will need to provide €23.5 billion and Spain another €15 billion. To, you know, bailout Italy and Spain” What is becoming increasingly clear, when you take this news combined with the comments of the

Is Mario Monti’s administration in Italy democratic? Is Greece’s new government? To some, especially in the blogosphere, it is the exact opposite: a technocratic and undemocratic government foisted upon Italy and Greece by (circle as appropriate) Angela Merkel/Nicolas Sarkozy, the Bilderberg Group/EUSSR, etc. But nobody forced Silvio Berlusconi to resign. Nobody sacked him. Under pressure by the markets, he chose to resign. He could have stayed and nobody denied that he had a constitutional right to do so. It would have cost Italy dear, but he could have stayed. In addition, Monti was appointed to the Senate by the Italian president who himself is elected by Parliament in a joint

Berlusconi has finally resigned – and so continues what seems to be the Arab Spring in reverse (a Gnirps Bara). In the Arab world, people rose up against undemocratic juntas and democracy ruled. In Europe, undemocratic juntas are springing up in Frankfurt opera houses and toppling democracy. All Sarkozy had to do was help the rebels who wanted to remove the targeted leader. The cover story of this week’s magazine has a piece by yours truly about the Frankfurt Group of eight people who are calling the shots. Only two members are directly elected: Sarko and Merkel (well, three if you count the Prime Minister of Luxembourg, which we shouldn’t

The word sweeping across Italy is that the PM may be forced to step down in a matter of hours, even “minutes”. Ex-minister Giuliano Ferrara says: “That Silvio Berlusconi is about to resign is clear. It is a question of hours, some say of minutes.” And he couldn’t leave too soon. The Italian bond yield busted the 6.5 per cent threshold to reach 6.58 per cent this morning. It’s now close to what some traders call “bailout territory”. News of Berlusconi’s imminent resignation has sent Italian stocks soaring though – the FTSE MIB is up 2.4 per cent. Berlusconi’s scandal-ridden premiership and bunga-bunga antics have caused political deadlock in Rome

Politics is serious business, especially when the world’s economy is at stake, but so much of what’s going on in the eurozone now – especially in Italy – resembles opera buffa. Today in Rome, amid rumours that Berlusconi would throw in the towel in January (but not because of bunga bunga, because of bungling over economic reform), a few deputies in parliament came to blows.   The fisticuffs was over that hotly contended if not-very-sexy issue – the retirement age. At least two members of the Northern League, a key party of Berlusconi’s coalition, fought with members from the opposition FLI. ‘Two deputies grabbed each other by the throat as