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Giulio Tremonti Warns Against New Crisis and Bail-In, Calls for Bank Separation
21 May 2014
Former Italian Economy Minister Giulio Tremonti warned against a repetition of the 2008 crisis in a video interview with the online daily affaritaliani.it. "In my view, there is the threat that a crisis would break out again, because the same conditions are back again — with one additional concern: All government money has been used up. Too many debts. Money has been printed, but you cannot go on printing money for too long. They are planning to grab citizens’ savings. They say ’bail-in’ in English, but it means grabbing bank deposits. "I think the threat is there and the only way out is to separate banking activities. If you collect citizens’ savings and use it for enterprises, families, communities, that is all right and government protection is correct. But as things stand now, you collect citizens’ savings to speculate with it, and on top of that you are protected by the government, do you think that is fair?" In the last days, Tremonti has been in the center of the political debate generated by former U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s memoir Stress Test, in which Geithner reveals that European officials invited him to join a plot to overthrow the Italian government in 2011, when Tremonti was Treasury and Economy Minister. In several newspaper and TV interviews, including one published by EIR, Tremonti revealed that Italy did not agree to pay into the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) if this was going to be turned into a bank-bailout fund, and that is the reason why then French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel plotted to overthrow the Italian government under Silvio Berlusconi and replace it with a technocratic puppet, Mario Monti. Decisive in the plot was the role played by the ECB, which sent an ultimatum to the Italian government threatening not to support the value of Italy’s sovereign debt, Tremonti said, comparing the letter signed by successive ECB Presidents Jean-Claud Trichet and Mario Draghi to a mafia message. |