Italy

A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of banking collapses in Italy, which could lead to renewed crisis in the eurozone, and a wider banking crisis affecting other countries with high exposure to Italian bank debt. Italy’s banks are in deep trouble, weighed down by €360bn of bad debt (“non-performing loans” in the jargon), equivalent to a fifth of Italy’s GDP (and about 18% of all the banks’ loans).

In Italy the banking crisis has been written on the wall for some time, the product of the concurrent circumstances of a weak economy (with attendant increase in the banks' NPL [non performing loans]), the imposition by the ECB of ever tighter capital requirements along with near-zero interest rates and untimely adoption of bail-in provisions.

Dugin (D): The UK’s withdrawal from the European Union is an event of colossal importance. The whole architecture of the world is changing, because it is not just one of the European countries, it is one of the poles of European civilization.

Euro 2016 has just begun. Thousands of fans, despite unprecedented security measures, have already collided in real fights. This alone demonstrates that football for...

By Bill Van Auken Five years after a US-NATO war shattered Libya, Washington is preparing to send troops into the oil-rich North African nation for...

Stefano Fassina was Vice Minister of Economy and Finance of Italy, but he left the government after a disagreement with policies of PM Mateo...

From 2015 until now more than 1,300,000 immigrants have tried entering into Europe. Most of them get to Europe from Turkey to the Greek...

Stefano Fassina, MP and former Deputy Finance Minister of Italy, kindly sent me the following opinion piece. While convinced that the “controlled disintegration of the...