Mario Draghi
Mario Draghi was the president of the European Central Bank who said in London in July 2012 that the bank would do whatever it takes to preserve the euro, and that it would be enough, and it was: the sentence turned the sovereign debt crisis without the bank buying a bond, and a decade later Italy made him prime minister to spend the recovery money and he lasted seventeen months. He was born in Rome in 1947, orphaned at fifteen, studied under Federico Caffè at Rome and took a doctorate at MIT under Modigliani and Solow, and was director general of the Italian treasury from 1991 to 2001, where he ran the privatisations of the state's industries and the accounts that got Italy into the euro. The meeting on the royal yacht Britannia in 1992 at which the sales were discussed with British bankers is the origin of every conspiracy told about him. He was at Goldman Sachs from 2002 to 2005, governor of the Bank of Italy from 2005, and president of the ECB from November 2011, when Greece, Ireland and Portugal had been bailed out and Spanish and Italian yields were at the level that had broken them. He cut rates, lent the banks a trillion euros for three years, and then, at an investment conference on 26 July 2012, said the sentence. The Outright Monetary Transactions programme that gave it form was never used, because the promise sufficed. He took the bank into negative rates in 2014 and quantitative easing in 2015 against the Bundesbank, and left in 2019 having kept the currency whole and Germany unhappy. In February 2021, with the pandemic and two hundred billion euros of recovery funds to be spent, President Mattarella asked him to form a government of nearly every party, which vaccinated the country, wrote the recovery plan and passed the reforms Brussels wanted, until the Five Star Movement, the League and Forza Italia withdrew in July 2022 and he resigned. The election that followed brought in Meloni. His report on European competitiveness in 2024 told the Union it was falling behind and needed eight hundred billion a year to stop. The Union agreed with it and did not find the money.
- Lived: 1947 CE – ?
- Nationality: Italian
- Roles: central_banker, prime_minister, economist
