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| Venus de Merkel - Peter Brookes by The Times |
L'Italia ha problemi finanziari: si tratta di obbligazioni e salvataggi, non solo Berlusconi dice in un suo articolo Bill Emmott il famoso giornalista del Times ex direttore dell'Economist
I problemi italiani sono il sintomo di una crisi più ampia, che potrebbero influenzare la zona euro per diverso tempo.
Si è tentati di accusare Silvio Berlusconi per il modo in cui l'Italia si è trovata in balia dei mercati finanziari 'e, come primo ministro del paese stesso, seguo il detto di Oscar Wilde : "Posso resistere a tutto tranne che alle tentazioni". Eppure, per una volta, dare tutta la colpa a Berlusconi non sarebbe del tutto giusto.
Di sicuro, il fallimento di Berlusconi, da quando è entrato in politica nel 1994, per svolgere la sua promessa di portare la riforma liberale in Italia è il grande motivo per cui l'euro è la terza più grande economia, vulnerabile ad una crisi del debito sovrano. La sua crescita è stata anemica: negli ultimi dieci anni il suo PIL è aumentato di meno del 3 per cento in tutto, mentre la Francia è cresciuta del 12 per cento. Nel frattempo, il debito pubblico ha la stessa percentuale del PIL oggi come era nel 1995: 120 per cento, il secondo più grande della zona euro dopo la Grecia.
Il risultato è che l'Italia è vulnerabile a qualsiasi aumento dei costi dell'indebitamento pubblico. Questo nonostante il fatto che il ministro delle Finanze, Giulio Tremonti, è riuscito nonostante il pregiudiziale istinto spendaccione del suo capo governo ed ha eseguito una delle politiche fiscali più strette della zona euro, con un deficit di bilancio di quest'anno meno della metà della dimensione di quello della Gran Bretagna.
La notizia che Berlusconi stava cercando di sbarazzarsi di Tremonti, il suo ministro , l'unico rispettato a livello internazionale, ed aveva reso pubblica la sua contrarietà per nuovi tagli fiscali sul bilancio di austerità ha reso insicuri i mercati. Il solito irresponsabile, ma resosi conto con la sua faccia tosta tipica, Berlusconi ha invertito la sua posizione ed ha chiesto l'unità nazionale sul bilancio. Il bilancio è stato votato, ma rimangono dubbi nei confronti
di Tremonti, e del fatto che i quattro quinti dei tagli siano differiti fino al 2013 e 14.
La Germania, dal canto suo ha un comportamento strisciante verso una giusta conclusione della crisi. Le banche tedesche e francesi come pure la Banca centrale europea sono troppo implicate finanziariamente con la Grecia e la Merkel si muove con un comportamento unilaterale paese per paese e non prendendo l'euro nel suo insieme.
L'articolo originale è in fondo alla pagina
La copertina di Der Spiegel
Ciao Bella! - La caduta del paese più bello del mondo
Che cosa accadrà in Italia? Silvio Berlusconi ha rovinato il suo paese
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Europe
By Hajo de Reijger, The Netherlands |
Italy’s financial woes: it’s bonds and bailouts, not just Berlusconi
Bill Emmott
Italian troubles are the symptom of a wider crisis, one that could affect the eurozone for some time
It is tempting to blame Silvio Berlusconi for the way in which Italy has found itself in the financial markets’ gunsights and, like the country’s Prime Minister himself, I follow the Wildean dictum: I can resist anything except temptation. Yet, for once, to blame Mr Berlusconi would not be entirely fair. Two larger, more lasting issues are also culpable.
For sure, Mr Berlusconi’s failure, ever since he entered politics in 1994, to carry out his promise to bring liberal reform to Italy is a big reason why the euro’s third-largest economy is vulnerable to a sovereign debt crisis. Its growth has been anaemic: over the past ten years its GDP has increased by less than 3 per cent in all, whereas France’s has grown by 12 per cent. Meanwhile, its public debt is the same percentage of GDP today as it was in 1995: 120 per cent, the eurozone’s second largest after Greece.
The result is that Italy is vulnerable to any rise in government borrowing costs. This is despite the fact that the Finance Minister, Giulio Tremonti, has succeeded in over-ruling his boss’s spendthrift instincts and has run one of the tightest fiscal policies in the eurozone, with a budget deficit this year less than half the size of Britain’s.
For all that good behaviour, an analysis by UniCredit, Italy’s largest bank, shows that in the absence of faster economic growth it would take just a 2 percentage point rise in the Government’s average borrowing costs to make the public debt level head in the Greek direction. That is just what has been happening. Half of Italy’s debt is financed domestically, being bought by banks, insurance companies and households. This offers some comfort, but it still means that the other half of a €1.5 trillion stock of debt is held by flightier and more demanding international investors.
The news that Mr Berlusconi was trying to get rid of Mr Tremonti, his only internationally respected Cabinet minister, and had made public his preference for new tax cuts over the fresh austerity budget put forward by him was bound to roil the markets. It was typically irresponsible, and it is with typical chutzpah that Mr Berlusconi has reversed his position and called for national unity over the budget. That has prevailed and the budget has been passed. But there is still room for doubt in the markets, given that even on Mr Tremonti’s plans, four fifths of the cuts are deferred until 2013 and 14. Perhaps he has been reading Ed Balls’ speeches.
Typical is the apt word, however: Italians are used to Mr Berlusconi’s behaviour. But something else is starting to feel typical too, and it is coming not from Italy but from the governments of the northern European members that now call the shots, especially Germany. This is a continued disregard both for the reality of the debt situation in the eurozone and for the consequences for other eurozone members of actions taken or contemplated for one of its members. It is odd: this is a common currency, with a common monetary policy, and yet Germany is behaving as if each country within it can be treated as if it were separate. The reason is that the consequences of accepting that this is a collective problem are both economically and politically explosive.
Germany is creeping towards one right conclusion: that Greece, for all its undoubted efforts to cut its public spending and raise more tax revenues, is insolvent. It cannot afford to service its debts at their current level of 150 per cent of GDP, and the austerity packages are making those debts less affordable, not more. So a way needs to be found to reduce the debt burden, just as had to be done in Latin America during the 1980s. Lenders have to write off part of the value of the debts, and those lenders include German and French banks as well as the European Central Bank, none of whom are happy about the fact.
The new realism that debt relief is necessary does count as progress. But to pretend that it can be done just for Greece is a delusion. Worse, it is a delusion with consequences, which were seen in the past week’s sell-off of Spanish, Italian and, for a while, even French government bonds. After all, if Greece is to get debt relief, why shouldn’t other governments ask for it too? And even if they say they wouldn’t, bond markets are going to bet that some of them would, just in case. That is the question that needs to be answered at the eurozone’s latest emergency summit on July 21.
The only way out of a collective, broadly applied write-down of eurozone government debt, with all the losses it would cause to banks, insurance firms and pension funds, and all the potential for chaos in debt-insurance markets, is to make the treatment of Greece so different from that of the others as to convince markets that they will not follow.
Short of the presumably unfeasible political annexation of Greece by Germany or by the European Commission, this has to mean ejection from the euro, which, although it would bring a devaluation, would probably also exclude Greece from borrowing from the financial markets for several years to come. That is a ghastly prospect for Europe and would still invite speculation about other ejections. But it would concentrate governments’ minds. The alternative, a collective write-down of eurozone government debt, brings in the second, larger and potentially long-lasting issue, which is becoming steadily more manifest. It is that government bonds are moving from being supposedly safe havens to being among the riskiest.
That is what defaults and debt restructurings mean. Governments would like to pretend otherwise, which is why they excluded sovereign debt from their initial stress tests on European banks last year. For how could a safe asset be stressful? When governments decide to default on it, that’s when. The latest stress tests, released on Friday, showed a good pass rate also because the risk of debt defaults was played down.
Yet at the same time, governments are trying to force or at least incentivise their financial institutions to hold more and more government bonds by introducing regulations that require far less capital to be held by banks as backing for gilts and which demand that insurance firms hold a certain portion of their assets in this form. The origins of this lie in the tendency of regulators and politicians to fight the last war rather than the next one. They are dealing with the previous sort of risky behaviour rather than the current one.
The consequences, however, could be with us for a long time. Our main repositories of savings are being made to lend more to governments and less to companies. Such financial repression, as bankers call it, is not a recipe for rapid economic growth.
Profezia
