STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
Italy Struggles and Consensus Withers, as Predicted
By Staff News & Analysis - March 29, 2013

Center-left leader Pier Luigi Bersani has assessed options after failing in his attempt to find a way out of Italy's political deadlock and President Giorgio Napolitano Italy center-left says will now seek another solution. Napolitano's office said Bersani, who took the largest share of the vote but failed to win a viable majority, had told him his talks with other parties had ended without resolution and the president would now assess other options "without delay". – Reuters

Dominant Social Theme: Italy is going through a rough patch but will soon be okay.

Free-Market Analysis: We are led to believe from this report that the process of creating a government in Italy is moving ahead even though it is obviously difficult.

In fact, we have anticpated the difficulties in several articles, pointing out that Brussels Eurocrats and the globalists behind them may not want a resolution to the Italian crisis any time.

This comes on the heels of the Cyprus crisis that was infinitely aggravated by loose talk from Brussels about how savings account garnishment could be applied throughout Southern Europe.

Some actually applauded this talk as appropriate within a "get tough" free-market perspective, but for good or ill, the prospect of bank runs in Southern Europe has certainly been increased. And the Italian political environment remains a mess:

Bersani said he had told Napolitano of "significant, positive elements of understanding" in the talks with groups including Silvio Berlusconi's center-right bloc and the populist 5-Star Movement led by ex-comic Beppe Grillo.

Napolitano's office said Bersani, who took the largest share of the vote but failed to win a viable majority, had told him his talks with other parties had ended without resolution and the president would now assess other options "without delay".

Bersani said he had told Napolitano of "significant, positive elements of understanding" in the talks with groups including Silvio Berlusconi's center-right bloc and the populist 5-Star Movement led by ex-comic Beppe Grillo.

The failure to reach a conclusion leaves Italy still stuck in political limbo more than a month after the election with the bank crisis in Cyprus fuelling fears of financial market turmoil that could threaten

Officials said Napolitano would start a new round of consultations with parties on Friday, beginning with Berlusconi's People of Freedom (PDL) party in the morning and ending with Bersani's Democratic Party (PD) in the evening.

A PD spokesman said Bersani had not given up on forming a government but the PDL poured scorn on the center-left leader and said he had wasted a month in a fruitless bid that proved he did not have the numbers to govern.

Napolitano has said he opposes a snap new election to end the impasse but his options are severely limited if he is to avoid a return to the polls within months.

They include naming an outsider to head a technocrat government like that of outgoing Prime Minister Mario Monti or a cross-party political coalition but any government must be able to rely on a majority in parliament.

On Thursday, the main indicator of market confidence – the spread between Italian 10-year bonds and their safer German counterparts – widened to 350 basis points, some 30 points higher than the level seen before the February 24-25 election.

We can see from this that a lack of political consensus has economic consequences. Italian spreads are widening and if this keeps up, Italy will doubtless enter into a full-scale economic crisis.

One must bear in mind that Italy is not Cyprus, nor is it, even Greece. It is one of the EU's largest economies and a financial disruption in Italy is an event fraught with risks for the euro generally and even for the European Union itself.

Of course, our cynical perspective – as stated before – is that surreptitious, globalist support for Beppe Grillo and his new, socialist oriented party is intended to make the Italian political scene unmanageable. As terrible as it sounds, there are obviously elements of European leadership that want a prolonged and exacerbated crisis. This would explain the clumsy handling of Cyprus and the evolution of Europe's endless, five-year-old crisis.

We have even predicted the rise of a national social credit movement in Italy courtesy of Grillo. This smacks of what we call a "dominant social theme." The idea is that those behind central banking know that the days of untrammeled money printing are coming to an end and are trying to substitute a kind of quasi-Greenbackerism for pure 20th century monopoly central banking.

The idea is to keep the process of money printing in the hands of a few individuals. So long as a few people control money stuff, the globalists are satisfied. They fear free-markets and free banking above all and have hired or supported an ongoing movement to promote government control of money as an alternative to public/private central bank monopolies. We believe Grillo and his party – which has a social credit orientation – may be part of this gambit.

Bersani had expressed hopes up to the last minute that he could overcome the difficulties but appeared to have run into a wall, particularly in his overtures to Grillo, whose movement says it will not support a vote of confidence in a government led by either the center right or center left.

After Thoughts

You see? The sticking point is Grillo; and thus the Italian crisis advances. We are not surprised.

Posted in STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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