Italy and the euro

Following up on my last post about Greece, and why a Marshall Plan is unlikely to work, I want to share an excellent piece of work by Edward Hugh at Credit Writedowns, who makes a strong case for Italy's bleak future in the euro zone.  His take is that Italy simply lacks the productivity to earn what's required to pay its debt down. The points here can be applied to other countries as well.

In short: structural adjustment programmes that lower unit labour costs are required. That's what living with the euro means.