Roberto Maroni is back in the Italian press again today, and with another interview. This interview is in ilResto del Carlino. (Interestingly enough they are running an online poll, and the result was running at 51.7% euro to 48.3% lira). Unfortunately the interview is in Italian. I have translated a few extracts under the fold. The big issue that he draws attention to (and I was flagging this in an earlier post) is the apparent desire of Berlusconi not to commit himself if he can help it.
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Tag Archives: Italy
The Week Ahead
This week promises to be another ‘busy’ one. Today the EU finance ministers (Ecofin) are meeting in Luxembourg, to discuss the condition of the common currency after last week’s ‘battering’ in the press and in the financial markets. Also headed for Luxembourg is EU Economics Commissioner Joaquim Almunia. Amongst other items he will have one in particulr which is high on his agenda: a meeting with Italian Ecomy Minister Domenico Siniscalco. Almunia is due to present a report on Italy’s deficit situation to the Commission tomorrow, and will almost certainly recommend the initiation of an excess deficit procedure under the revised terms of the stability and growth pact.
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Italian Referendum Call
But in this case the vote would be about Italy’s continuing membership of the euro-zone, rather than the EU constitution. Now before going any further, I feel the need to advise extreme caution in the face of such developments.
In the first place the call comes from the Italian Labor Minister – and member of the separatist Liga Del Norte – Robert Maroni: It was made in an interview published by the Italian newspaper La Repubblica. He was not making a statement on behalf of the government, he was in all probability ‘electioneering’. (See Fran’s post: those politicians).
On the other hand, Berlusconi is pretty vulnerable at the moment, remember he has just put together a new coalition, and elections are coming next year.
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French Referendum: Italian Bonds Hit
What, you may ask, has Italian government debt got to do with the French ‘no’ vote: everything would be my answer. (If you want to know more about this, thumb down my euro posts). The lack of a convincing advance towards political union makes Italian government debt riskier, so they have to pay more interest. This is, at present just a small breach, but it is one which is widening, and I fear this is the point at which the euro dyke will eventually breach:
“The euro hit a fresh 7-month low against the dollar and Italian government bonds came under strain on Monday after French voters gave a decisive thumbs-down to the proposed European Union constitution…………….The strains the French vote could have on the euro zone were reflected in government bonds. The spread on Italian BTP bonds over German debt touched 23 basis points, the highest level since November 2002, as so-called peripheral euro zone bonds suffered.”
The problem is that the markets have now ‘wised up’ to the problem, and will now be tracking Italian government debt as an issue in itself.
Scary Stuff
In a post which appeared earlier this week Tobias asks us whether, given some of the possible consequences of a French “non”, it might not be reasonable to ‘scare’ voters a little by spelling out some of the potential fallout which might follow a French rejection of the Constitution Treaty.
Perhaps the phrasing is unfortunate, but undoubtedly voters in Eurozone countries need to think long and hard about one especially sensitive area of impact: the future of the euro itself.
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The Giuliana Sgrena Story
I have to confess that I’m utterly mystified by this story.
Short recap for those who haven’t followed the events. Giuliana Sgrena, an Italian journalist for Il Manifesto and contributor to the German Zeit, was abducted outside of Baghdad on February 4. The outrage was great – Italians went on the streets to protest and demand her release, the Zeit magazine dedicated an entire section with articles, pleas and reports to Ms. Sgrena.
13 days into her abduction, a video surfaced in which a haggard, terrified, tear-choking Sgrena pleas for an end of the Italian engagement in Iraq. It was a chilling document and no one who saw it was left untouched.
The Italian government promised to do everything to secure her release — short of calling its troops home.
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The Value of Learning a Second Language
What is the value of learning a second language aside from the obvious practical benefits : the fact that you can talk to people who don’t speak your first language, can read things which have not been translated, can politely talk to people who don’t find it easy to speak your first language and can read things in the original.
When I was in high school adults tried to convince me to try to learn a second language by claiming that it broadens the mind. They failed. Since then I have, more or less, learned Italian. What have I gained ?
My impression is that my mind reminds just about as narrow as it was before.
I asked Elisabetta Addis (the woman to whom I am married) what she gained from learning English. She said it was very useful, because by learning a second living language she learned that there is more than one way to structure concepts, that is that the structure of Italian is not the structure of truth, but is rather just one of many equally valid structures developed for historical reasons. I confessed that I have had the impression that Aristotle was not always totally clear on the distinction between his immense contributions to understanding Greek and to understanding thought and logic and would have confidently claimed that true though was only possible in Greek. I was as usual speaking from ignorance.
Trying to understand my different impression, she suggested that math is, for this purpose, like a second language (she learned English and math beyond a fairly elementary level simultaneously and imagine how fun that was).
I said that I suspect that part of the reason is that no one could possible mistake the structure of English for the structure of truth. Partly, of course, English spelling is totally arbitrary and makes no sense. Also English is not logical because it is part German and part French. For example to find if a claim is true one verifies it. Or steer meat is beef and sheep meat is mutton. That is, since English is a weird hybrid, English is its own second language.
If so, this is important, since the only people who have a choice about learning a second language or not are native English speakers.
My unassisted thoughts on the topic below the fold.
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Who is Roberto Frimigoni ?
Google thinks that means Roberto Formigoni and so do I. One year ago FreeRepublic.com
posted an effort to translate the list of people who got free (but not valueless) rights to buy oil from Iraq under the oil for food program. The list was published by an Ahmed Chalabi affiliated newspaper in Iraq. Chalabi to freerepublic is not exactly the most reliable sourcing. However I was interested that the
list included one Roberto Frimigoni, who does not, as far as anyone can tell actually exist.
8 months ago I guessed that Roberto Frimigoni was Roberto Formigoni president of Lombardy. A week ago confirmation was all over the papers.
So who is Roberto Formigoni ? He is the founder and leader of “communione e liberazione” a very devoutly catholic organisation which has a history of dubious financing. As such he became a rather prominent Christian Democratic politician. When the party collapsed he went with a splinter that was un-alligned then a sub-splinter allied with Silvio Berlusconi and finally a sub-sub-splinter allied with Silvio Berlusconi. In this capacity he was elected and re-elected president of Lombardy.
For some reason which I can’t understand, Formigoni uses every available opportunity to attack Rosy Bindi formerly health minister in the Prodi government. The obsession is particularly irritating, since he begins his attacks by saying that she divides the world into good people like her and bad people like her opponents. Aside from that, my most vivid memory of his service as president of Lombardy was when he said that Bindy was profiting from tragedy when she noted (correctly) that responsibility for inspecting a high preassur oxygen chamber which burned killing patients belonged the region. Formigoni insisted that the chamber had been inspected thoroughly. He had to revise his assertion when it was noted that the facility included two pressure chambers of which only one was licensed and that the thorough inspectior had failed to notice the second chamber (which is roughly the size of a beached wale).
In his capacity as a very devout catholic he followed the Pope in denouncing desert storm and then sanctions on Iraq. He was, in 1991, perhaps the most prominent and eloquent Italian opponent of Desert Storm over shadowing the Italian left which was divided and confusing Needless to say, like 80% of Italians he was opposed to Bush Jr’s invasion.
The sudden explosion of evidence and allegations against Formigoni is, for him, unfortunately timed since he is up for re-election in two months. My original post in Italian below the fold.
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It’s Deficit Time Again
There’s a fair amount of talk again this week about the various government deficits and what to do with them. Earlier in the week the FT had a piece about the current state of play with the US deficit whilst the Economist is busy musing one more time over the ongoing saga of the EU growth and stability pact.
These two situations appear, on the surface, to be somewhat similar, but in reality it may be more interesting to consider how they differ.
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Italy’s No-Growth Update
OK I’m on a roll, so I’m going to stick my neck out. This slide in the Italian confidence index apparently surprised the ‘experts’. Well it shouldn’t have surprised Fistful readers who have been following what I have been saying. Clearly these confidence indexes are not the last word in sliced bread. But they do mean something, and Germany’s Ifo index just turned in another bad reading too.
Ever since Parmalat, I have been asking one simple question: will Italy ever grow again? Of course, the simple answer is possibly it will: never say never. But will it ever get back to vigorous growth: this I doubt. I am even half asking myself if we will see positive numbers in more than say 50% of the forthcoming quaters. Remember, if my demographic thesis has any predictive power it should be precisely here in Italy that the Titanic starts to take in water. Parmalat was simply the iceberg. Of course my thesis could always be wrong. Any takers?
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