{"id":178576,"date":"2018-10-23T19:11:00","date_gmt":"2018-10-24T00:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2018\/10\/23\/who-blinks-first\/"},"modified":"2018-10-23T19:11:00","modified_gmt":"2018-10-24T00:11:00","slug":"who-blinks-first","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2018\/10\/23\/who-blinks-first\/","title":{"rendered":"Who Blinks First?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The European Commission has told the Italian Government that its budget is not acceptable, and the Italian government has told the European Commission to pound sand<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The Italian government will not budge from its position on the country\u2019s budget plan even though it is in breach of EU rules. <\/p>\n

In a three-and-a-half page letter<\/a> sent on Monday to commissioners Pierre Moscovici and Valdis Dombrovskis, Finance Minister Giovanni Tria wrote: \u201cItaly is aware it has chosen a path that isn\u2019t in line with EU rules. It was a hard decision but necessary in order to bring the country\u2019s GDP back to pre-crisis levels and considering the ongoing economic difficulties for Italians.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tria went on to address the three objections raised by Moscovici and Dombrovskis in their letter<\/a> to him last week, saying the government is confident it can achieve the ambitious growth targets it has outlined. Tria\u2019s letter explained that the government will increase public investments and implement a number of significant structural reforms that should help trigger such growth. However, should Italy\u2019s \u201cgrowth trajectory evolve differently to what we expect, we would intervene,\u201d he wrote. <\/p>\n

Tria concluded the letter by saying that although the positions of Rome and Brussels are different, he hopes a \u201cconstructive dialogue\u201d within the framework of EU rules can continue. He said Italy\u2019s place is \u201cin the eurozone.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This situation is likely going to be rather different than that of Greece, or even Spain:  Italy is a far larger economy, and its current ruling coalition is not irrevocably linked to the Euro or the EU as, for example, Syriza was in Greece, which made meaningful negotiations impossible.<\/p>\n

Also, it should be noted that even with the spending increase, the budget remains in primary surplus (its revenues exceed all spending but interest on the debt).<\/p>\n

As I’ve noted before, the problem with the EU in general, and the Eurozone in particular, is the hegemony that Germany, and its economic philosophy, hold over the entire European Project.<\/p>\n

Even without the obvious history, current events have shown this to be a bad thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The European Commission has told the Italian Government that its budget is not acceptable, and the Italian government has told the European Commission to pound sand: The Italian government will not budge from its position on the country\u2019s budget plan even though it is in breach of EU rules. In a three-and-a-half page letter sent …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[446,630,394,439,444,374],"class_list":["post-178576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-budget","tag-european-union","tag-foreign-relations","tag-government","tag-international-finance","tag-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178576"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=178576"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178576\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=178576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=178576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=178576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}