Roberto Mazzoni: Eurozone in recession, the scenario

Roberto Mazzoni, an Italian journalist who has lived in the USA for years and is an expert in technologies and cryptocurrencies, gave a long interview to Money.it in which the current and future scenarios were analyzed in depth from his point of view, with a particular focus on the economic situation European Union, just at the beginning, according to Mazzoni, of a profound phase of crisis.
The complete interview is available here for Money.it premium subscribers.
Here is an extract from Mazzoni's statements on the economic situation in Europe: We know that the European Central Bank has announced the Eurodigital, which will arrive by 2025, by the end of 2025, and this Eurodigital, from what the European Central Bank tells us, will be mandatory throughout the European Union.
So even nations that are not part of the Eurozone today will still have to use Eurodigital.
In the ways to be understood, however, it falls within Draghi's logic, therefore unifying even more, enlarging rather than compressing the Eurozone and trying to defend the Euro through the addition of other member states through an economic regime that is of a war type, therefore where European states have invested relatively little in defense so far, let's say from the 90s onwards, a significant return of the military spending budget for the various European states, and a unified policy at the European Union level, both for both foreign policy and military policy, therefore a kind of export of the neoconservative model, NEOCON, which works so well in the United States, to Europe.
So while the United States is deviating, we have also seen it more and more in the political evolutions within the Congress, although we are still far behind the necessary changes, but we are seeing some signs, they are evolving towards greater fiscal agility and above all, greater discernment regarding defense costs.
We have seen that after the start of the crisis, the beginning of the crisis in the Middle East, a good part of the aid that was supposed to go to Ukraine from the Pentagon ended up directly in Israel, leaving Ukraine high and dry.
So if Ukraine has to defend itself, someone has to pay the bill and this bill will not necessarily be paid by the United States.
So this is the situation and in this situation we generally see a Europe that continues to shrink as an economy.
Draghi told us that by now it will certainly be in recession by the end of the year and that the results will be seen in the next two quarters, in the first six months of 2024.
So it means that the recession probably already started in October for the eurozone, in Germany it had already started earlier, in April.
However, for the Eurozone as such it probably began in October and since a recession is defined when the gross domestic product decreases for two consecutive quarters we will probably only have official confirmation in June next year, but we know that the economy is slowed down in Italy, if I'm not mistaken industrial production has been declining for six months and counting, and therefore destined to fall even more also because Italy is naturally connected to Germany.
Germany has slowed down enormously from an industrial point of view due to the high cost of energy and, furthermore, Italy is significantly dependent on China for the supply of semi-finished products that it uses in its own industry.
We know that the current government has decided to interrupt participation in the Belt Road Initiative, the Silk Road, which can also be a policy that can be shared from certain points of view, but in this particular phase, in this particular moment, it risks creating additional friction : with China already having difficulties in dealing with the European Union, in fact it has significantly decreased exports to Europe and imports into Europe, and therefore creating a further problem for Italy which would find itself not only this point is economically restricted by a national budget which is in deficit and therefore must then be restarted by the European Central Bank and on the other by a notable growth in energy costs because energy is the central food and a decrease in supply low-cost semi-finished products from China.
Therefore it would be a continuous decline in Italian industrial production from now on to be defined.
GO TO THE FULL INTERVIEW During the interview many other topics were touched upon, obviously including the war scenarios present in the world and the related political and economic processes.
Here is the content schedule of the complete interview: 00:27 Economic war in the Middle East 01:05 US monetary policy 06:00 Trade and currency war 12:03 Impact of China and Russia on the world economy 17:41 Situation Europe's economy 11.58pm Currency and energy war 9.45pm Financial war between the United States and China 35.27am Biden Presidency 37.51am Brics currency and economic war 39.30am Digital euro 40.04am City of 15 minutes 41.12am Transport public in the United States 47:22 Social control and war economy 52:42 Possible replacement of Joe Biden with Newsom 54:32 Electric cars in the USA GO TO THE FULL INTERVIEW