A relatively recent ivy league study, followed 100 economists for thirty years and found that their economic predictions were no better than a dart throwing monkey? And that the more notable/notorious and well-publicized the less accurate their prognostications?
If Italy had an economic formula that actually worked or was at least pragmatic or followed logic's rites?
Nowhere in their recent history, has there been the sort of national commitment of post-war, war-ravaged, Germany or Japan!
Just the insanity of individualism and both ends divided against the middle! Coupled with an expectation of a different outcome for the same recipe or fundamentally flawed formula and subsidized protectionism. All while expecting else from all others, even as the rich get richer, the poor get poorer and the gap between the haves and the have-nots, widens exponentially!
What will it take to change the fundamental economic paradigms?
A revolution and quite massive bloodletting!?
Not for nothing is it writ large that there are none so deaf that WILL NOT HEAR AND NONE SO BLIND THAT WILL NOT SEE! Economics is hardly an exact science. In fact, it's said, one can put ten economists in the same room and get thirty different opinions. Postwar America and Australia saw unprecedented prosperity. And based on Keysenian economics and the forced investment of the war that had to still flow into the wider economy.
And wound back and mugged b successive conservative administration ever since!
Because that economic forced on them, sanity failed to fit their preferred ideological imperatives! Or the concentration of finite wealth in fewer an fewer hands!
Let them leave the EU and shack up with an increasingly belligerent Russia, and see where that gets them?
After all, they have a history of picking the wrong side and paying for it!
Alan B.

I don't disagree with the content of this article, but I strongly disagree with the title! Italy exitting the Euro would be far less of a crisis than Italy allowing the rest of the Eurozone to treat them like they treated Greece. Far beer to allow Italy to negotiate from a position of strength, even if it means they'll leave the Euro if faced with unreasonable demands.

Well, Italians are highly popular with me; they make the worlds best diving equipment ...

I think the Italian populist parties are about to get a very rude shock.

How so?

As usual Alan B flaps about everything especially those subjects he knows little about.
To begin with the Italians don't give a flying fukkk about what the rest of the world thinks and in particular the EU
It is a country that achieves 'in spite of' and not 'because of' and it is that quality the rest of Europe, much less the rest of the world, has failed to emulate.
It's citizens believe in live and let live....within social reason and are probably their own worst enemy but it's of their choosing.
The one failing the Italians have is not enough public toilets to cater to the millions of paying visitors it has every year
As a country it achieves what it achieves quietly and without the fanfare and ongoing cancer cures as occur in Australia on a bi daily basis....it doesn't have an identity problem and the country itself is a living museum that the rest of the world pays homage to, and all roads still lead to Rome.
Then we have yokels like Alan B desperately waiting to be recognised as the father of Thorium espousing his mediocre opinion about what he knows nothing about.
A social embarrassment desperately seeking attention much like flatulence heralded by verbose noise and having an unpleasant presence