Will Mario Draghi’s Center Hold?
A closer look at the Italian prime minister’s career reveals how the tangled history of post-Keynesian economic thought shaped his technocratic brand. Mario Draghi on March 10th 2021 (Samantha Zucchi/Insidefoto/Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images)
Italyâs new Prime Minister Mario Draghi has been hailed as the nonpartisan expert the country needs to get its house in order. But who is Draghi? A closer look at his career reveals the tangled history of post-Keynesian economic thought and European neoliberalism that inform the prime ministerâs technocratic brand.
Draghi was born and raised in Rome, the child of a banker and a pharmacist. In 1970, he received his undergraduate degree from Romeâs La Sapienza, under the supervision of star economist and public intellectual Federico Caffè. Draghiâs mentor took part in the Resistance and was an architect of the new democratic Italy while work
Asset purchase programmes ecb.europa.eu - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from ecb.europa.eu Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Patrick Kaczmarczyk
Amid the market turmoil in March 2020, the president of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde, said the bank was ‘not here to close spreads’ only to do a subsequent U-turn, announcing that it remained ‘fully committed to avoid[ing] any fragmentation’ in bond markets. The selling of Italian and other southern-European bonds which followed Lagarde’s initial remark undoubtedly showed her how dangerous such comments can be, especially in a market environment of uncertainty and stress.
Despite an echo here of her predecessor Mario Draghi’s 2012 ‘whatever it takes’ declaration this time expressed as ‘no limits to [the] commitment to the euro’ the question remains as to how determined the ECB will be, and for how long, to avoid centrifugal forces in the eurozone taking over again in the future, not least after the judgment of the German constitutional court in May 2020 insisting that it justify its bond-buying programme. Yet there is surprisi