Italy Finances

In danger of losing coveted front-rank status in the European Community, the Italian government Wednesday imposed an austerity budget designed to narrow an alarming government deficit. The controversial budget, written by a ruling four-party coalition, will mean "difficult years but essential ones," Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti told Italians in a nationwide television address. "Soon, the European Community will examine our accounts.

Italy now expects to raise $19 billion from the sale of more than a third of Enel, the state electricity company, in the largest initial public stock offering ever. Trading will begin Tuesday, and the price is likely to rise steeply. Funds tracking the benchmark Milan stock market indexes that haven't received all the shares they've requested will have to buy more to ensure that their portfolios carry the same weighting of the shares in the indexes, analysts said.

In a quick gesture of damage control, the embarrassed Italian government Friday named new leadership for the country's largest bank amid a scandal over $2.6 billion in unauthorized export credits to Iraq made by a branch in the United States. Giampiero Cantoni, a well-known socialist who had been heading a bank in Milan, was named to replace Nerio Nesi as chairman of the troubled state-owned Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, known in the financial world by its initials as BNL.

In danger of losing coveted front-rank status in the European Community, the Italian government Wednesday imposed an austerity budget designed to narrow an alarming government deficit. The controversial budget, written by a ruling four-party coalition, will mean "difficult years but essential ones," Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti told Italians in a nationwide television address. "Soon, the European Community will examine our accounts.

Italy now expects to raise $19 billion from the sale of more than a third of Enel, the state electricity company, in the largest initial public stock offering ever. Trading will begin Tuesday, and the price is likely to rise steeply. Funds tracking the benchmark Milan stock market indexes that haven't received all the shares they've requested will have to buy more to ensure that their portfolios carry the same weighting of the shares in the indexes, analysts said.

Italian Prime Minister Giovanni Goria agreed to withdraw his resignation after a request from President Francesco Cossiga to end a three-day government crisis. Goria, the 44 year-old Christian Democratic leader, will return to Parliament this week to seek a new vote of confidence from a house which has humiliated him with a series of embarrassing defeats on vital finance measures this year.

A small Communist party whose leader reveres Cuban President Fidel Castro and courted Mexican guerrillas on Thursday brought down Italy's 55th postwar government. Prime Minister Romano Prodi resigned after his allies in the Communist Refoundation Party refused to tolerate welfare cuts the government says are vital for Italy's entry into the common European currency.

It was but a glance, a little smirk that the German and French leaders shared in public when asked about Italy's prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, and his country's economic woes. But that moment at a recent crisis meeting made it very clear where Italy — and everyone else — stands in the Eurozone pecking order. Many Europeans realize that their futures are being increasingly dictated by Germany and France — in that order of importance — personified by a mashup of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy dubbed "Merkozy.

Even a politician with the survival skills of Silvio Berlusconi proved, in the end, to be no match for the power of global financial markets. The beleaguered Italian prime minister bowed to the reality of international pressure and withering domestic support Tuesday, promising to resign once Parliament passes a reform package of cuts aimed at reining in a runaway debt crisis. The question now is whether Berlusconi's departure would be enough to arrest the decline in Italy's perilous financial condition, which has moved the front line of Europe's debt crisis from peripheral countries such as Greece and Ireland to one of its central economies.

Italy's Parliament is pressing hard to ratify reforms clearing the way for Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to resign, but it will be left to his successor to solve structural problems decades in the making that are central to the debt crisis now dragging down the European — and the global — economies. The nation's $2.6-trillion public debt is the result of low productivity, corruption, suffocating bureaucracy and poor tax policies. Its economic performance between 2000 and 2010 was so bad, according to some estimates, that only Haiti and Zimbabwe fared worse in average annual growth.

In a quick gesture of damage control, the embarrassed Italian government Friday named new leadership for the country's largest bank amid a scandal over $2.6 billion in unauthorized export credits to Iraq made by a branch in the United States. Giampiero Cantoni, a well-known socialist who had been heading a bank in Milan, was named to replace Nerio Nesi as chairman of the troubled state-owned Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, known in the financial world by its initials as BNL.

Italian Prime Minister Giovanni Goria agreed to withdraw his resignation after a request from President Francesco Cossiga to end a three-day government crisis. Goria, the 44 year-old Christian Democratic leader, will return to Parliament this week to seek a new vote of confidence from a house which has humiliated him with a series of embarrassing defeats on vital finance measures this year.

The J. Paul Getty Trust, with its collection practices under fire in Italy, its finances under scrutiny by the state attorney general and a new center for the study of antiquities about to open in Malibu, has expanded its board from 12 trustees to 16. The newcomers -- Stewart A. Resnick, William E.B. Siart, Mark S. Siegel and Peter J. Taylor -- bring a long list of financial and educational credentials at a time when critics have accused the trust's sitting board of inattention.

When Mathis Pascouret recently entered the world, something was dangerously wrong. His mother had unwittingly passed on to him potentially lethal bacteria while he was in the womb, and he was near death. With a fever of 102 and his heart, lungs and stomach malfunctioning, the gasping newborn was whisked by ambulance to a state-run hospital here in central France. In the new neonatal emergency care unit at Hotel-Dieu Hospital, Dr. Jacqueline Gaulme and others toiled to save the infant's life.