(Finance) – “The meeting yesterday with the President Biden it went very well. In this meeting we agreed on the fact that you have to support Ukraine but we must also begin to talk about peace. And it must be a peace that Ukraine wants“. The Prime Minister said so Mario Draghi during the press conference at the Italian embassy a Washington after meeting yesterday with Joe Biden at the White House.
“We agreed that we must continue to support Ukraine and put pressure on Moscow but also begin to ask ourselves how peace is built. The negotiation process is very difficult but the first point is how to build this negotiation path, it must be a peace that Ukraine wants, not an imposed peace “, he added. “The war has changed physiognomy, initially it was a war in which it was thought there was a Goliath and a David, essentially of desperate defense that also seemed to fail, today the landscape has completely turned upside down, certainly there is no longer a Goliath, certainly what seemed an invincible power in the field and with conventional weapons has proved not invincible “.
“All parties they have to make an effort to get to sit around a table, even the US “reiterated the Premier.” At the beginning of the war in Parliament it was said in Italy that we had to have a role, I replied that we must not seek a role, we must seek peace , whoever the people involved are, the important thing is that they seek peace, not partisan affirmations. We must not try to win, the victory is not defined: for Ukraine it means repelling the invasion but for others?“, he said.
Then there is the problem of energy prices. “Italy is doing a lot to achieve independence from Russian gas,” said Draghi. “I also reminded Biden of the issue of the possibility of putting a ceiling on the price of gas, a hypothesis welcomed, even if the US administration is reflecting more on an oil price ceiling than on gas, it was decided that we will talk about it again together soon. “In the energy market” distortions are very strong in the EU, now the measures, if they can be taken, are being planned “but” in the EU we must agree and as you know the opinions are not unanimous but on this we will continue to move forward “.
Chapter inflation: “central banks must raise rates but if they raise them too much they cause the country to fall into recession but Lagarde is fully aware of this difficulty. The situation is very different between the US and the EU, in the US the labor market is fully employed,” in Europe no, so the step of monetary policy normalization will necessarily be different. We as a government we can try to mitigate the loss of purchasing power on the weaker categories “.