Well, that was quick:
In Italy, the honeymoon for Mario Monti, an economist who became the country’s premier designate on Sunday, was quickly ending. Monti was holding intense meetings with Italy’s notoriously divided political parties on Tuesday to win backing for a new cabinet. But after an initial recovery in Italian bonds, investors again drove Italy’s borrowing rates above the unsustainable 7 percent mark.
The eurozone economy is flat; Germany’s central banker announced in no uncertain terms yesterday that the ECB had better not provide liquidity to markets in any way, shape, or form; Angela Merkel told her own party that the answer to Europe’s woes was more fiscal integration, something that obviously isn’t going to happen anytime soon; and the fundamentals of the eurozone’s problems haven’t really changed a bit. Put all that together, and everything is unsurprisingly sliding right back into chaos. Tick tick tick.