European Central Bank President Mario Draghi defended the results of two decades of European political and monetary integration against the return of “illiberal” policies and regimes. Speaking in his native Italy, where a euro-skeptic populist government is openly flaunting European Union rules, Draghi listed the euro’s successes, while admitting that not all have benefited equally from it. He said that lower than expected prosperity in some countries was due to domestic policy choices and to an incomplete monetary union. He also denied that the economic under-performance of some euro-area countries could be reversed by leaving the single currency and ignoring EU deficit rules. “As the history of Italy has shown, monetary financing of government debt did not lead to real long-term benefits,” he said.

Source: National Post December 15, 2018 15:45 UTC