Articles About Italy

International lenders and Greece will renegotiate the program on which the second financial bailout for Athens is based because the original has become outdated, according to a senior Eurozone official.  Greece received a €130-billion bailout in February from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).  General elections in May and June delayed the […]

Europe’s unemployment has soared to 10.8 percent, the highest rate in more than 14 years as companies from Spain to Italy eliminated jobs to weather the region’s crisis, according to the European Union’s (EU) statistics office.  That’s the highest since June 1997, before the Euro was introduced.  European companies are cutting costs and eliminating jobs […]

European leaders will this week try to deliver new fiscal rules and cut Greece’s onerous debt burden.  All this in the wake of Standard & Poor’s (S&P) Eurozone downgrades. France was not the only Eurozone nation to feel the pain. Austria was cut to AA+ from AAA; Cyprus to BB+ from BBB; Italy to BBB+ […]

Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has asked for international oversight of his efforts to slash the eurozone’s second-largest debt, even as his unraveling coalition threatens efforts to build a wall against Europe’s debt crisis.  Berlusconi’s government asked the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to assess its debt-reduction progress, and turned down an offer of financial assistance. […]

Whoops!  Someone has a red face.  France’s credit ratings have not been downgraded by Standard & Poor’s (S&P) and apparently resulted from an accidental transmission of a message that it had downgraded the nation’s credit. S&P’s error roiled global equity, bond, currency and commodity markets when it sent and then corrected the erroneous message. “As […]

The midnight oil burned in Brussels as European finance ministers, heads of state, bankers and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) try to reach an agreement to restructure Greek debt.  In the deal, private banks and insurers would accept 50 percent losses on their Greek debt holdings in the latest bid to reduce Athens’ immense debt […]

World Bank President Robert Zoellick believes the world will not slide into a double-dip recession. Zoellick was in Singapore, attending an economic conference amid plummeting world stock prices and worries over a slowdown in U.S. economic growth.  Zoellick believes the United States and the world will avoid a “double-dip” recession, but admitted that growth is […]

Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan says that Italy is the root of most of Europe’s economic problems, as well as our own.  In a recent appearance on “Meet the Press”, “It depends on Europe, not the United States,” Greenspan said. “The United States was actually doing relatively well, sluggish but going forward until Italy ran […]

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said he would speed the passage of a 40 billion-Euro ($56 billion) deficit-cutting plan to stop a market selloff that threatens Europe’s single currency.  The “crisis prompts us to speed up” approval of the budget cuts, Berlusconi said since Italian stocks lost nearly 7.5 percent over two sessions and bond […]

The United States has fallen to third place – behind China and Germany – in the development of clean energy sources, according to a new report from the Pew Charitable Trusts. Investment in global clean energy expanded significantly in 2010 to $243 billion, a 30 percent increase over 2009.  China, Germany, Italy and India were […]