Entire Eurozone in danger

Italy has decided not to introduce a solidarity tax on incomes over 90,000 euros per year, contravening the austerity plan initiated at the beginning of August. With this move Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has endangered all the euro countries, writes the business paper Les Echos: "Berlusconi's methods may be satisfactory for some of his supporters. But that doesn't ease Italy's problem in the least. With public debt at 120 percent of GDP, Italy needs money. ... Silvio Berlusconi can implement almost any austerity plan he wants in September - perhaps even an entirely new version - by making use of the vote of confidence. In the European context, however, such behaviour is hardly acceptable because it runs the risk of dragging the entire Eurozone into the Italian crisis. This shows once more that the Eurozone is urgently in need of economic government as demanded by Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy."

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