PUBLIC DEBT HYSTERIA IN ITALY 🇮🇹
Each passing day, I'm more and more astounded at the hysteria surrounding public debt in Italy. This hysteria has country-specific peculiarities. In Italy it's somehow different from the US, the UK or Germany. 1/18

This hysteria is due not only to ideology, but also to provincialism, pusillanimity, rancor towards the State and disregard for legitimate national interest. Let's analyse these issues. 2/18

IDEOLOGY. The Italian free-marketers ("liberisti all'amatriciana") are often a parody of their American and British counterparts. They seem to lack (or pretend to lack) basic understanding of the functioning of government bonds. 3/18

There's no such thing as a free market of government bonds. Or better: a free mkt of gov't bonds can exist only in a monetary union where the central bank doesn't guarantee that single national governments will not fail. We've seen the negative effects of such architecture. 4/18

However, thanks to PEPP, the @ecb implicitly prevents governments' failure. At least for the moment.
This means that the mkt for gov't bonds is controlled by a public authority:it's what usually occurs(and should occur) in every well-functioning modern economy(and democracy) 5/18