God Help Us, Berlusconi is Italy's Best Hope

I know that this sounds like a joke, but I'm as serious as a heart attack.

The Euro (as it is currently structured, it should be called the Reichsmark, because it is structured by Germany to benefit it's position as a predatory exporter) is of no real benefit to Italy, and Berlusconi is the only credible Italian political figure who is willing to say this:

The nation is richer than Germany in per capita terms, with some €9 trillion of private wealth. It has the biggest primary budget surplus in the G7 bloc. Its combined public and private debt is 265pc of GDP, lower than in France, Holland, the UK, the US or Japan.

It scores top of the International Monetary Fund’s index for “long-term debt sustainability” among key industrial nations, precisely because it reformed the pension structure long ago under Silvio Berlusconi.

“They have a vibrant export sector, and a primary surplus. If there is any country in EMU that would benefit from leaving the euro and restoring competitiveness, it is obviously Italy,” said Andrew Roberts from RBS.

“The numbers are staring them in the face. We think the story of 2013 is not about countries being forced to leave EMU but whether they choose to leave.”

A “game theory” study by Bank of America concluded that Italy would gain more than other EMU members from breaking free and restoring sovereign control over its policy levers.

………

Rome holds a clutch of trump cards. The one great obstacle is premier Mario Monti, installed at the head of a technocrat team in the November Putsch of 2011 by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the European Central Bank – to the applause of Europe’s media and political class.

Mr Monti may be one of Europe’s great gentlemen but he is also a high priest of the EU Project and a key author of Italy’s euro membership. The sooner he goes, the sooner Italy can halt the slide into chronic depression.

The sooner that someone who counts (not Greece, not Portugal, and probably not Spain) declares that the Euro is a failure, and that it needs to be abandoned, the better it will be for most of the people in the Euro Zone.

The Eurobanksters will lose, and Angela Merkel will lose, but the entire Euro Zone, including Germany, is now in recession because of German competitive needs, and German mythology. (it wasn't the hyperinflation that brought the Nazis to power, it was the hard money contractionary policies, policies that the Germans are demanding for the rest of the EZ that did)

Absent Germany withdrawing from the Euro, the currency is doomed, and the sooner that it is abandoned, the better.