LETTER: Italy’s enormous deficit could sink EU
Brexit may be the lifeboat that prevents UK from going down with the European bloc because of one errant member
As UK politicians speed read the 500-page draft Brexit agreement while trying to understand exactly what it means, the Italians have told the EU that they won’t amend 2019’s budget to remove their “unacceptable” deficit. While all this confusion and complexity — not to mention French President Emmanuel Macron’s recent scholastic distinction between patriotism (good) and nationalism (bad) — is symptomatic of Europe’s malaise, could there be an even larger iceberg lurking just out of the public eye and ready to finally rip the bottom out of Europe’s utopian project? Italy’s Target Two balances are said to be near record negative levels and approaching half-a-trillion euros. This is supposed to be a sort of accounting entry put in place to prevent euros from sloshing out of the EU’s net importing nations. If these Target Two balances mean anything in the real world, a “missing” half-a-trillion euros of them should be quite sufficient to sink not only Italy and the EU but probably also ...
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