Financial Times
November 11, 2011
Europe’s debt crisis has been compared more than once to an earthquake – but never in such dramatic terms as the headline that appeared on Thursday on the website of Il Sole 24 Ore, the voice of Italian big business: Fate presto – “Act fast”.
The same words were used 31 years ago by Il Mattino di Napoli, a Naples newspaper, when it urged Rome to stop dithering after an earthquake killed almost 3,000 and left another 300,000 homeless. Their reappearance was a sign that the euro emergency had wreaked a deeper shock than ever. World leaders and financial markets went on to red alert, and by the end of the week two democratically elected leaders – Greece’s George Papandreou and Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi – found themselves being eased out of office at Europe’s behest and replaced by unelected technocrats.
Like a life-threatening disease, trouble spread this week from the eurozone’s fingers and toes into its beating heart. The nation in peril was no longer a small, outlying state such as Cyprus, Greece, Ireland or Portugal, but Italy – the world’s eighth largest economy, a founder member of the European Union and a country so deeply in debt that the funds required to save it would be far beyond anything yet amassed by Europe’s crisis managers.
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