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Sept. 8, 2008 (LPAC)-- Giulio Tremonti polarized the last day of the Ambrosetti international seminar in Cernobbio, Italy, yesterday, with a proposal to use the European Investment Bank to launch a major plan for public investments in Europe. "The economy is in a crisis and we see that everywhere in Europe: only a large plan of public investments can pull Europe out of the global crisis," Tremonti said. He called for using the European Investment Bank (EIB) as the credit instrument for financing such projects, and announced that he will ask a feasibility study to that purpose at the next Ecofin meeting Sept. 12. The EIB was founded in 1958 and is a bank whose shareholders are the 27 EU member states, with a share proportionate to the importance of the member state. So, Germany, Italy, France and the U.K. have each 16.1% of the shares; Spain has 9.7%, Belgium and the Netherlands each 4.4%, and so on down to Malta, the smallest shareholder with 0.04 %. The board of the EIB is composed by the Finance Ministers of the EU member states. The current EIB capital is EU164.8 billion. Tremonti said that the model for the EIB new role are the German Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau(KfW) and the French Caisse de Depot. His proposal was supported by Italian opposition leader Walter Veltroni, who suggested that infrastructure investments should be taken out of the deficit.

Tremonti was asked by a member of the audience what is his ideology. "We have no ideologies but ideas," he said. "We do not approve of any ideology that characterized the last century: nor the latest ones, the 'nothing-ism' of 1968 and 'marketism.' We are against nothing-ism, for instance, on school." On 'marketism' he said that "the last reports from the United States show [the evidence of] financial insanity. We believe that there is more morality in a car than in a financial derivative, and we believe more in industrial production than in finance for itself." Lyndon LaRouche commented on the Tremonti statement, observing, "Tremonti's intentions are clear, and he is sending a signal of those intentions. He is not yet pushing concrete legislation, and we should not try to analyze how it is to be actually implemented as legislation."