What united these two very different versions of Italy was a political system that transferred resources from the North to pay for the South while not fully taxing its citizens to make up the shortfall because of the persistence of traditional class alignments in the South. As a consequence, persistent deficits, which turned into debts that were reduced by persistent devaluations of the exchange rate, made it possible. Adopting the euro ruled out such devaluations, but the collapse in interest rates that it engendered sustained the unsustainable a bit longer. In 2000, Italian net debt to GDP was 93 percent. In 2007, it was 87 percent. Today, it is 100 percent, as the crisis and austerity policies lower the Italian economy's already sclerotic growth rate of about 1.5 percent a year (for the past twenty-five years) while the debt owed gets bigger still and rates have shot up.

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 196