25 October 2018

Italy is posing a far bigger challenge for Brussels bureaucrats than Brexit

Stephen king

From a British perspective it is all too easy to imagine that the only thing that matters in life is Brexit. From a European perspective, however, Brexit is not the biggest headache. Threatening to take back control when you are outside the single currency area is bad enough. Threatening to do so when you are the eurozone’s third largest economy is far worse. If I were a Brussels bureaucrat I would be more worried about Rome than Westminster. Countries within the eurozone are supposed to stick to the fiscal rules; free-riders are frowned upon. If a country misbehaves it can be placed under the European Commission’s excessive deficit procedure. There are two possible triggers: first, the country’s budget deficit exceeding 3 per cent of GDP;…

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