
Pity Matteo Renzi. Italy’s prime minister knows that his country’s troubled banking system has put its nascent economic recovery at risk. Yet Italy’s own financial weakness and European Union rules severely constrain his options. Not all the news is bad, though. Renzi’s financial team has come up with an imaginative response to the country’s bank problem with what they call the Atlante Fund, a rescue package to buy up risky loans. But the fund has its own limits, given the precariousness of Italy’s finances, and by implication Europe’s. Past regulatory oversight or maybe just negligent private management have left Italian […]