{"id":39087,"date":"2018-10-13T07:15:07","date_gmt":"2018-10-13T12:15:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=39087"},"modified":"2018-10-13T07:15:07","modified_gmt":"2018-10-13T12:15:07","slug":"italy-declares-war-on-merkel-and-the-eu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=39087","title":{"rendered":"Italy Declares War on Merkel and the EU"},"content":{"rendered":"<header><\/header>\n<header><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"img-responsive\" title=\"Italy Declares War on Merkel and the EU\" src=\"https:\/\/www.strategic-culture.org\/images\/news\/2018\/10\/12\/or-41547.jpg\" alt=\"Italy Declares War on Merkel and the EU\" \/><\/header>\n<h3><a href=\"https:\/\/www.strategic-culture.org\/news\/2018\/10\/12\/italy-declares-war-merkel-and-eu.html\">Italy Declares War on Merkel and the EU<\/a><\/h3>\n<p>If there were ever any doubts that the leaders of the Euroskeptic coalition that now runs Italy has a plan to defy the European Union its proposed budget should quell them. Both Deputy Prime Ministers, Luigi Di Maio of Five Star Movement and Matteo Salvini of The League, were adamant about locking horns with European Union leadership over all issues of sovereignty between now and May\u2019s European Parliamentary elections.<\/p>\n<p>Their budget proposal which included both tax cuts and universal income blew past the EU budget limit of 2.0% of GDP, coming in at 2.4%. It has put their Finance Minister, Giovanni Tria, in a difficult position because Tria doesn\u2019t want to negotiate this budget with Brussels, preferring a less confrontational, read more pro-EU, approach.<\/p>\n<p>Salvini and Di Maio, however, have other plans. And since I began covering this story last year on my blog, I\u2019ve said that it was imperative that Salvini force the issue of the Troika\u2019s demands \u2013 the EU, European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund \u2013 back down their throats on debt restructuring\/forgiveness.<\/p>\n<p>What I meant then, and I was focused on Salvini\u2019s emergence as the leader of this fight, was that Salvini and Italy, because they are more than technically insolvent, have all the leverage in the negotiations. The size of their outstanding debt and the liabilities existent on the balance sheets of banks across Europe, most notably the nearly $1 trillion in TARGET 2 liabilities, are something Juncker, Draghi, Merkel and Christine LaGarde at the IMF simply cannot ignore.<\/p>\n<p>But, to do this Salvini and now Di Maio have to make a good faith effort to negotiate a good deal for Italy with Brussels, Berlin and the IMF. This is why the budget squeaked past the 2.0% limit and then they walked it back to 2.0% but with provisions they knew would anger the EU finance ministers.<\/p>\n<p>\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Italy Declares War on Merkel and the EU If there were ever any doubts that the leaders of the Euroskeptic coalition that now runs Italy has a plan to defy the European Union its proposed budget should quell them. Both Deputy Prime Ministers, Luigi Di Maio of Five Star Movement and Matteo Salvini of The [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,5],"tags":[279,284,1464,20316,20251,21280,16963],"class_list":["post-39087","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-geopolitics","tag-eu","tag-european-union","tag-italy","tag-luigi-di-maio","tag-matteo-salvini","tag-strategic-culture-foundatioin","tag-tom-luongo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39087","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39087"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39087\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39088,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39087\/revisions\/39088"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39087"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39087"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39087"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}