“What we expect is that Governments do their job, living up to their responsibilities”. Starting with the reduction of the budget deficit. This is the appeal that the president of the European Central Bank, Jean Claude Trichet, launched this morning from the microphones of the French radio "Europe 1" to the governments of the euro area, in particular those of Italy and Spain. The Eurotower yesterday began buying Rome and Paris bonds on the secondary market, helping the two countries contain losses on the stock exchange and significantly reduce the spread gap.
Trichet confirmed today that the community institute is buying government bonds on the secondary market and intends to continue to do so, although this "is not what we should do". In recent days “we have asked the Italian Government in an extremely clear way to take a certain number of decisions that have been taken, and in particular to speed up the return to a normal budgetary situation. We asked the Spanish government for the same thing. And we have asked all the European governments, the 17, to speed up the decisions they took on July 21” at the Eurozone summit. On that occasion, Trichet added, "we asked them to confirm that a financial stabilization fund was well operational that could also intervene on secondary markets as quickly as possible".
According to journalistic sources, the Frankfurt institution would have asked Italy to bring the deficit-GDP ratio to around 1% next year against the 2,7% programmed by the Government's budget package. This would be the main request contained in the famous letter signed by Tichet and his next successor Mario Draghi and sent to Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. A condition that our Executive would have accepted in exchange for the support of the ECB on the bond market. On Friday, the Italian prime minister and economy minister Giulio Tremonti announced their decision to bring forward the balanced budget from 2014 to 2013.
Supporting countries in difficulty through the purchase of bonds would not be part of the tasks of the European Central Bank, created to control the stability of the single currency and the trend of inflation. It would rather be the responsibility of the EFSF (the European Financial Stability Facility), which however has not yet been financed sufficiently, despite the fact that its statute was modified by the leaders of the Eurozone at their meeting on 21 July last to allow it to operate even on the secondary market.
