Mario Draghi: Goodbye ECB, Hello Italian Presidency?

While the entire financial world is hanging on to every Mario Draghi word in hope Europe finally improves the market’s (if not the economy’s) “fundamentals” to new record highs, and joins the rest of the “developed” world’s central banks in injecting trillions of liquidity into the Div/0 P/E stocks “whatever it takes” (because in a world where only multiple expansion is left, the ECB is the last wildcard at least until the US is dragged right back into the global recession and the Fed admits any pipe dreams of a rate hike in 2015 were just that), something far more different may be taking place behind the scenes. According to at least one journalist, the Fiscal Times’ Patrick Smith, “Draghi appears set to leave Frankfurt and return to his native Italy the first chance he gets.”

Has the former Bank of Italy exec and Goldman employee had enough of fighting Germany tooth and nail over every proposal, if mostly for dramatic media consumption? “Impossible” most would say, and yet…

[Draghi’s departure] could be as soon as January, depending on a variety of circumstances in Frankfurt and Rome, according to well-placed sources who include a prominent private investor and a senior journalist in Rome. “Draghi wants out, fed up and stymied by Berlin,” one of these sources wrote in a note just before the weekend. In a subsequent message: “I am hearing from several [official] sources that he is entirely fed up with the monetary politics he confronts.”

EU: Bonino urges ‘United States of Europe

(ANSAmed) – Rome, May 15 – Italy’s foreign minister Emma Bonino has called for a ‘United States of Europe’.

“I am a confirmed federalist and so is this government,” Bonino said on Wednesday.

“Our objective remains the United States of Europe” and “a system that guarantees major results and also savings in the area of defence, research, major infrastructure and obviously foreign policy”.