Yes that's why many are ready here to ditch the common currency experiment before it does too much more harm!

It was on ET I read how Germany was bending the rules in their favour, back in the Greece crisis. How much of their debt was forgiven, how the 6% rule was breached, and the incredible story of how the 3% number was arbitrarily conjured out of some Frenchman's nether regions.
Predatory capitalism has become the OS of European finance, protecting anal goldbugs' hard currency savings value stasis fantasies while the southern euro-states founder and falteringly re-climb out of the economic muck again, with the sword of Damocles swaying over their heads.
The pearl-clutching in Brussels suggests something holy about the Euro, that the currency itself has lėse majesté, that it's the sheerest of heresies to even breathe a suggestion that it may not be irreversible (pace Draghi) or its terms renegotiable.
The nervous hysteria is a sure tell there's a bluff going on. If the currency's success were a foregone conclusion after a decade and a half of practice using it, why are the results so unbalanced in favour of northern countries.
If Italy's capacity for innovation, design and productivity was so high it rivaled Germany's, what virus suddenly infected the country to so swiftly degenerate it into a pack of corrupt, shiftless parasites with zero work ethic and a penchant for a life of ease?
The Bild propaganda has done its dirty work just as the Sun's did for Brexit voters.
Italy's industrial heyday was before the galloping globalisation that has enriched Asia just as colonialism enriched Europe.
So many factories of businesses nurtured in Italy have moved a few kilometers to take advantage of cheaper labour the other side of the border, this is doing the country in much more than the Mafia or incompetent governments, (hardly an Italian exclusive).
The EU decision to import cheap Tunisian frozen olive oil (as reward to encourage the country into democracy after the Arab Spring) was doubtless well-intentioned, but was it really so important that it was worth pauperising Italian olive farmers?
Ditto lemons from Cile breaking citrus farms here etc etc?
The idea of the EU was to protect Europe's member states from the pressures of globalisation, not the opposite.
Italians are fed up with being treated as second-class Europeans by the Northern contingent who are the only ones really profiting from the Euro.
The pain of leaving will be traumatic and immense, the country will eat bread and onions for a few years until freedom from the Euro-yoke is complete, but then its ability to re-flower its economy will be by its own merit, not because a generation of sleazy politicians wasted zillions on boondoggle vanity projects financed by cheaper interest rate loans than they were used to, indebting the country up to its eyeballs.
The very topography of the country determines that small to medium businesses will always the the backbone of Italy's economy, the very sized businesses that suffer most in this climate of global corporate giantism.
That's why Italians feel conned by the Euro, and betrayed by Prodi for signing up for it.
Those against leaving it are so terrified of the immediate consequences they don't see beyond that short-term view.
Besides, as Migeru and Jake used to say about Greece back in the day, what is the EU going to do, send gunships?
Disselbloem, Tusk, Jungker et al are so ratty because they're bluffing, their Euro is a castle built on sand.
Shh, tiptoe through the tulips, intone the right pieties, don't disturb the confidence fairy or the spread will come sort you right out and it'll be Troika-time!
(Hold still and it won't hurt so much when we come after your 1000 billion of savings stashed away for that rainy day Italians justly fear.)

Italy is getting up off its knees.

Sorry Europe, your bluff ain't working any more.

Reform or get out of the way.  


'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

Regarding your last point, the EU countries that isn't euro countries has managed better. Yes, the commission has said that you can't leave the euro without leaving the EU, but it remains to be tested.

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