ITALY: The Ghost of Mario Monti

                                ITALY: The Ghost of Mario Monti

Everyone is watching Draghi these days. As anticipated, Italy called its rainmaker, and now everyone is waiting with bated breath, no one with more trepidation than that peculiar political race italians graciously call “Tecnici di area”, meaning reliably , “politically grounded” experts.

Yet finally the coy bride to be has shown at least a scrap of her dress, in the guise of..... a new ministry. There's no beating back the Italian bloodline, you have to admit that.

It has been confirmed, or better “been allowed to be confirmed” from the very voice of WWF no less, that a “Ministry for ecological transition” will be established, at the behest of Movimento 5 stelle leader, Beppe Grillo, and in order for his party bigwigs to survive an internal referendum on their “Rousseau” platform.

Bear in mind that the tormented rapport between Italians and ministries goes way back: the “Radicali”, the only true libertarian party for the masses and individual ever born in Italy, once managed to pass the request for a referendum on scrapping the agricultural ministry1... and those ungrateful bastards, the voters, polled with a vast majority that they wanted the ministry scrapped into oblivion. Hence, since then we have a “ministry for agricultural policies”. That will teach the buggers.

Fast forward to today, and the Draghi bubble is starting to burst at the seams. Remember that harsh limitations on offshore drilling were one of the M5S central tenets, so while Italy has found reserves in the Adriatic, for example, it will have to pay former Yugoslav countries to deplete them and sell them back. For a profit of course, but hey, “other people's money”. I am quite intrigued if they will ban import of French energy since it's nuclear and reactors are not far from where I live (they are actually almost as near as the nearest of the old designated sites, Trino Vercellese).

So, at least one of the industrial policies of the Draghi government has firmed: if your trade uses a lot of energy, you will either not enjoy yourself very much, or you will have to strike an iron pact with politicians to offload the economic consequences on others, which has been the case for the past twenty years of marketless energy policy: you pay in proportion of your inability to read the tea leaves and your political entries.

It might be too early to assess the incoming government as “marketless” as well, but let's say this: With Salvini's Lega in the bag, Renzi practically a political prisoner of his own rhetorical ploy, and Partito Democratico not viable as leading a charge, there was no need in sheer numbers to yield to M5S. Yet not only it has been done, it's the only concession granted so far. So kids, buyers beware.


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