"Accounts do not settle without growth. A 3% deficit/GDP makes sense at certain times, at others zero would be right, at others 4 or 5%”. Romano Prodi relaunches the proposal to amend the rules of the Maastricht Treaty. “It's not stupid that there are parameters as a point of reference – underlines the former prime minister in an interview with La Nazione - . It is stupid that 20 years are left unchanged. An agreement presupposes a policy that manages it and politics is not made with multiplication tables”.
The Professor lashes out in particular against the austerity imposed by Germany: "France, Italy and Spain should bang their fists on the table, but they don't because everyone is deluded that they can handle it on their own". As for our country, Prodi recalls that in three years of austerity "the debt/GDP ratio has always increased: it's a wrong policy, but if we exceed the parameters, rates will skyrocket". For this reason, the former center-left leader proposes "temporarily exclude from the calculation the 51 billion paid by Italy to European solidarity and use those resources for extraordinary public investments”.
Prodi's words come a few days after the United States' criticisms of German economic policy. In his latest report on the currencies and economic policies of competing countries, US Treasury accuses Berlin for "the anemic growth pace of domestic demand and dependence on exports". Two factors that "prevented a rebalancing at a time when many other countries in the euro area are under strong pressure to reduce demand and squeeze imports in order to promote budgetary adjustments". All this, according to the US Treasury, has caused "a tendency towards deflation both for the euro zone and for the world economy".
Furthermore, only a few months ago the International Monetary Fund he had publicly acknowledged, through the mouth of two of his top executives, that he had "wrong therapy" in an attempt to cure some sick countries (in particular Greece, Portugal and Ireland) with massive doses of austerity linked to the granting of loans. And today the positions taken against austerity continue to multiply. Recently the German Martin Schulz, president of the European Parliament and possible socialist candidate to lead the Commission, reiterated in an interview with La Stampa that "a rebalancing between rigor and development" is necessary "to generate growth, give air to small businesses , strengthen the single market and support domestic demand”.
Finally, according to a study published last month and authored by a leading economist of the EU Commission, Jan in 't Veld, Germany's domestic austerity has aggravated the recession in deficit countries, making "rebalancing harder in the periphery and further exacerbating the temporary worsening of the debt-to-GDP ratio."
