As president of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi saved the euro. In my estimation, this makes him history’s greatest central banker.But this time Italy’s crisis may well prove more intractable than the euro crisis of the early 2010s. The Italian crisis has very little to do with fiscal profligacy or general incompetence; as I […]
As president of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi saved the euro. In my estimation, this makes him history’s greatest central banker, outranking even the former Fed chairs Paul Volcker, who brought inflation under control, and Ben Bernanke, who helped avert a second Great Depression.
In a way, then, it wasn’t surprising that last year Draghi was brought in to lead Italy’s new coalition government — often labeled “technocratic,” but actually more a government of national unitycreated to deal with the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic. In a properly functioning democracy, nobody should be indispensable, but Draghi arguably was, as the only person with the prestige to hold things together.
