February 12, 2009 (LPAC)--In a long article published today in Corriere della Sera, as the G7 financial ministers and central bankers are arriving in Rome for a financial crisis summit, Italian Economy minister Giulio Tremonti reiterates his call for a bankruptcy reorganization solution, calling it, for the first time, "Chapter 11" for the banking system. Here is the relevant passage: "If the crisis is not a liquidity but an insolvency crisis (...) the medicine is not merging failed banks with other failed banks, it is not in the switch or swap between private and public debt, it is not in creating artificial, additional private demand. If you are doped, the remedy is not more dope. (...) Saving everything is a divine mission. If one thinks to save everything, through the last resort of governments, through public debts, you end up with saving nothing and at the end, you even lose public budgets.
"To save everything is instead a political mission. The form of thinking to implement in this perspective is very new or, rather, very old. It is altogether centuries old and wise. It is the biblical solution: sabbatical or jubilee year. It consists in separating good from bad. Saving families, industries, that part of banks which is functional to development. Separate the rest, put them in ad hoc vehicles, establish a moratorium on rates and time, sterilize the related values on balance sheets."
Recently, Tremonti has made clear that if people want a bad bank, it should be done without paying one penny for the assets to be dumped in, which should instead be frozen. Thus, it is now established that there are two versions of "bad bank", the Tremonti version (which is consistent with the LaRouche solution) and the British version. In his article today, Tremonti restates it: "The technical name can change: bad bank or Chapter 11, but the substance is the same, embedded in a radical separation of good from bad, of the functional from the speculative."
Tremonti also calls for introducing what he calls a "legal standard" system, which is subsumed in the slogan: "ban certain places, ban certain products, ban certain activities".