Saturday, March 2, 2013

"Italy may soon have to pull out of euro."


Beppe Grillo, the former comedian who holds the balance of power in Italy, has suggested the country may have to abandon the euro and return to the lire, reports The Telegraph.

In an interview with a German magazine published on Saturday, Grillo said that “if conditions do not change” Italy “will want” to leave the euro and return to its former national currency.

The comic-turned-political activist also said Italy needs to renegotiate its €2 trillion debt.

“Right now we are being crushed, not by the euro, but by our debt. When the interest payments reach €100 billion a year, we’re dead. There’s no alternative,” he told Focus, a weekly news magazine.

Grillo’s web-based, anti-establishment Five Star Movement won more than a quarter of the vote in Italy’s general election last week.


He refuses to do any sort of power-sharing deal with the centre-Left Democratic Party, which has shaky control of the upper and lower houses of parliament but without a big enough majority to form a government.

Grillo has called Pier Luigi Bersani, the leader of the Democratic Party “a dead man talking” and has predicted the annihilation of both the centre-Left and the centre-Right coalition led by Silvio Berlusconi within months.

It's unclear whether Grillo would want a strong currency that is not manipulated by the Italian central bank, or if he his in favor of mad money printing, but "re-negotiation" of debt, better known as bankruptcy is certainly a step in the right direction.

4 comments:

  1. Grillo's embrace of "social security" and other very left wing causes makes me doubt he would want a strong currency.

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  2. NOBODY in the Euro is going to pull out of the Euro.

    The people in charge don't want it to happen, so it won't happen.

    The drive for a world currency is so great, they will sacrifice millions of people if need be.

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  3. they are just poor mouthing to get the loans restructured in some way where the government isn't seen to paying that amount of interest, no government is going to have to resort to to relying on mere tax revenues.

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  4. Thank goodness someone is stating the obvious truth. Grillo hits the proverbial nail on the head re debt restructuring. Only trouble this needs to be global and pdq before spineless politicians collapse society in a pretence that they will ever pay back national debt.

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