(Finance) – Having disappeared from the radar for a while, the debate on the MONTH. In recent days, the president of the Eurogroup Donohoe asked for guidance during his conversation with the Minister of Economy Giorgetti.”The MONTH it is a tool created in 2010 to save countries in particular crises from default capable of threatening European financial stability, it is about that State Save Fund intervened – in the period 2010-14 – to the rescue of Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland and Cyprus. Obviously, in the face of the intervention of the Mes, these countries had to adopt a rigid peconomic – financial austerity rollover. This is what he explains in his Ecopillola Andrea Ferretti, economist, professor of the Master in Economics and Banking Sciences at Luiss Guido Carli.
THE REFORM: “in 2020 – explains Ferretti – a political agreement was found on a reform of the ESM whose most debated points were: the access conditions to the precautionary lines of the ESM, the softer ones for less serious situations and the excessive role attributed by the reform to the internal bodies of the ESM in the granting of loans to countries in difficulty”.
THE SITUATION IN ITALY: “On this reform, all the governments have already given their consent – including Conte 2 in 2020 – and all the parliaments of the Eurozone have already ratified this agreement. All the parliaments except the Italian one because we have a parliamentary alignment – inside and out of the majority – always against the ESM as it is accused of limiting the national sovereignty in the event of its intervention”.
RISKS ASSOCIATED WITH NO ITALIAN A MES: “Are we really sure that we can allow ourselves the luxury of lying down on the asphalt in front of Europe as environmentalists do to prevent the launch of this State Savings Fund?” Ferretti asks provocatively. “The answer is probably noif only to not appear bipolar in the eyes of the European partners. In fact, the attitude of isolating ourselves and opening a serious dispute could seem a bit bipolar at the very moment in which we asked the Commission for greater budget flexibility on the front of the deficit to support our productive fabric, at a time when we are asking for greater flexibility on the earthing of the PNRR due to our bureaucratic inefficiencies. Furthermore, we will shortly ask the Commission to approve – in the context of the new Stability Pact – a particularly soft and elastic debt repayment plan”.
“Not to mention – concludes Ferretti – that to someone our propensity to undermine Italy’s credibility might seem at least rather original making a U-turn on the ESM just when we desperately need the utmost credibility international. And this is because from 2023 we will have to finance our abnormal public debt without the protective umbrella of the ECB which from March will gradually reduce the purchase of European public securities, and in particular Italian ones”.
(Photo: © Michael Novelo / 123RF)