Abstract:
The crisis narrative to justify a non-elected Italian government is the reverse of the truth. By any rational assessment, the public finances of Italy became more manageable over the last twenty years, from seriously unsustainable to fundamentally stable.
While it is true that the public debt of Italy is over 100 percent of GDP, it is also true that at the end of 2007, just before the financial crisis hit Europe, the Italian debt in constant prices was the same as it had been ten years earlier. The faux crisis resulted not from the size of the Italian deficit, but from opportunistic speculation on short term public debt that came due in 2011 and 2012.