"It Belongs To The People, Not The Bankers" - Italy Moves To Seize Gold From Central Bank

Two weeks ago, somewhat out of the blue, ECB President Mario Draghi issued an odd statement confirming that the European Central Bank needs to approve any operation in the foreign reserves of euro zone countries, including gold and large foreign currency holdings. “The ECB shall approve both the operations in foreign reserve assets remaining with the NCBs (national central banks)…and Member States’ transactions with their foreign exchange working balances above a certain threshold,” “The purpose of this competence is to ensure consistency with the exchange rate and monetary policy of the Union.”

Specifically, Draghi made this statement to two Italian members of the European Parliament. At the time it did not seem notable for any reason other than its peculiar timing, but now things are starting to make more sense as The Wall Street Journal reports that Italy’s ruling populists pushed ahead this week with efforts to seize control of the central bank and its gold reserves. Complaining that hundreds of thousands of small individual investors lost billions of dollars after several Italian banks failed in recent years, the anti-establishment '5 Star Movement' and the nationalist 'League', depict the central bank as a symbol of a technocratic elite aloof from the needs of ordinary Italians. “We need a change of course at the Bank of Italy if we think about what happened in the last years,” said Deputy Prime Minister Luigi Di Maio, leader of the 5 Star Movement.

Five Star and the League have repeatedly attacked the Bank of Italy for not preventing the banking crises, and blamed it for the losses suffered by mom-and-pop savers who had bought bank shares and bonds. “If you are here with your current account in the red, it’s because the people who were supposed to control things didn’t do so,” League’s leader, Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, told a group of former investors in Banca Popolare di Vicenza, which was liquidated in 2017.

And this week saw Italian lawmakers from 5 Star asking Parliament to pass two draft laws:

One law would instruct the central bank’s owners, most of them private banks, to sell their shares to the Italian Treasury at prices from the 1930s. The other law would declare the Italian people to be the owners of the Bank of Italy’s reserve of 2451.8 metric tons of gold, worth around $102 billion at current prices. As The Wall Street Journal notes, such a move could in theory widen the scope for selling the gold and reduce the bank’s reserves, which help underpin the financial system…

“The gold belongs to the Italians, not to the bankers,” said Giorgia Meloni, leader of the Brothers of Italy, a far-right opposition party that supports both bills. “We are ready to battle everywhere in Italy and to bring Italians to the streets if necessary.” The establishment sees it differently, warning that their actions are an attempt to undermine the Bank of Italy’s independence, and to spend the nation’s gold reserves on populist policies.

“Gold is part of the assets of the Bank of Italy and can’t be used for monetary financing of the Treasury,” said Bank of Italy Governor Ignazio Visco. “This looks like revolutionary expropriation,” said Gianluca Garbi, chief executive of Banca Sistema SpA.

But as The Wall Street Journal concludes, the 5 Star Movement and the League support public ownership of the gold reserves, and with backing from parties comprising 60% of lawmakers, the draft law has enough support to pass. Lawmakers from 5 Star also support nationalizing the central bank, while the League hasn’t decided yet, leaving the bill short of a majority with around 40% support. As of last week they had forced the creation of a parliamentary commission to look into the failure of Italian banks, launching what could be months of tense scrutiny. Is it any wonder, Russia (and China) have started to horde gold?

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-04-05/it-belongs-people-not-bankers-italy-moves-seize-gold-central-bank

Ex-Murdoch executive pins resignation on Fox News' 'change in tone'

A former executive at the Rupert Murdoch-controlled News Corporation said Sunday he left the company in part because of a change in Fox News' tone.

"I noticed a significant change in tone. I'm a big believer in the marketplace of ideas, right? And I was fine working with and for people who had different values and opinions than I did. But I noticed a significant shift in the ferociousness, and frankly, the relationship with facts, you know, particularly on the Fox side," Joseph Azam, former senior vice president and group chief compliance officer at News Corp., said on CNN's "Reliable Sources."

Azam said the change took place around the time of the 2016 election when President Trump was elected to the White House. "It became very profitable to fall in line with an anti-immigrant, anti-refugee, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim rhetoric and I was affected by that," he explained. Azam joined News Corp. in 2015 and left in 2017. News Corp. is technically a separate entity from Fox News' parent company, but both have ties to Murdoch. Because he was on the legal side of the company, Azam said he "hadn't been exposed for a long time to a lot of what was going on on the opinion side." "I was in the legal department, you know, I was working with people who were not a part of that world. But every day in the elevators, I would have to endure the coverage, right, of a lot of the opinion shows, and frankly and interact with the folks who are on on TV," Azam said. "We had small talk. I understood what they were doing as soon as they got off the elevator. But in those couple of seconds, you know, we were colleagues, or at least we shared space, so I was exposed to it every day."

Others at the company were similarly dissatisfied with the company's shift, he said. "I'm comfortable saying I wasn't the only one that's troubled," by the "dehumanization taking place in some of the coverage and the opinion shows, by the 'other-ing' that was taking place, and frankly, what I viewed as a lack of decency," Azam said. "When people don't agree on facts, it's troubling for a lot of folks."

Azam said the New York Times' three-part story published this week on Murdoch's media empire "was a great report and it accurately described a lot of things that I heard and saw." "It's a place I loved working. In addition to the big personalities in the top, my experience was that there were a lot of inherently smart, hard-working descent people there that are left to do the work. But by and large, I thought it was fascinating and pretty accurate," Azam said.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/ex-murdoch-executive-pins-resignation-on-fox-news-change-in-tone

At NATO Meeting, Members Consider How to Counter China Threat

Chinese investment in Europe and their potential security threats to the region is under scrutiny following a recent meeting of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) held at the U.S. capital. At the meeting, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence stated that the rise of China is the “great challenge NATO will face in the coming decade.” He added that this meant the United States will need to devote more attention and resources to address the challenge. He also called on European allies to do their part in being vigilant on China. “Determining how to meet the challenge of Chinese 5G technology, meet the challenge of the easy money offered by China’s Belt and Road Initiative, is a challenge European allies must contend with every day,” Pence said on April 3. Pence made the remarks during the two-day NATO Engages event in Washington D.C., when member nations’ foreign ministers convened to commemorate NATO’s seventieth anniversary.

“One Belt, One Road” (OBOR, also known as Belt and Road) is an investment initiative announced by Beijing in 2013, which aims to build up trade routes in Asia, Europe, Africa through Chinese-financed infrastructure projects. The U.S. administration has criticized the initiative for putting developing countries into a “debt trap.” In Sri Lanka and the Maldives, for example, local governments could not pay off Chinese loans, leading them to hand off control of key infrastructure to China. Meanwhile, U.S. officials and experts have expressed concern that OBOR projects could be used to strengthen China’s military influence, or to spread technologies capable of spying on Western interests. Recently, Italy joined OBOR, signing a number of investment deals with China despite concerns from European and U.S. officials, as well as lawmakers within Italy’s ruling coalition. Pence’s concerns about China was echoed by German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas in a speech on April 4 in Washington, who said, “China is a challenge on almost every topic, and we must gain the better understanding what that implies for NATO.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/at-nato-meeting-members-consider-how-to-counter-china-threat_2870074.html