Look Who’s Frantically Demanding that Taxpayers Stop Italy’s Bank Meltdown

• Look Who’s Frantically Demanding that Taxpayers Stop Italy’s Bank Meltdown
  by Don Quijones, http://wolfstreet.com/  
  New Opportunities for “America’s Most Corrupt Bank.”
  It was a perfect gift to a desperate market. All that was needed was a gentle hint that Italy’s troubled banks and their bondholders might not be hung out to dry. A “public backstop” for Italy’s weakest lenders would be a “very useful” measure in these “exceptional times,” ECB President Mario Draghi said.
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  Most Italian and European bank stocks surged.
  The ECB is the second member of the institutional triad formerly known as the Troika to have called for a taxpayer funded bailout of Italy’s banking system. Earlier this month the IMF used its article IV consultation – an annual economic and financial health check – to warn of “global spillovers” from a full-blown Italian banking crisis, “given Italy’s systemic weight.”
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  Desperate times call for “significant measures,” says IMF economist Juan Toro. These measures include a taxpayer-funded state intervention, a practice that was supposed to have been consigned to the annals of history by Europe’s enactment of new bail-in rules on Jan 1, 2016. The idea behind the new legislation was simple: never again would taxpayers be left exclusively paying to bail out bondholders of Europe’s insolvent banks.
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  But even before the ink has dried, the new rules are about to be broken, or at least bent beyond recognition. Apparently this is necessary for two main reasons:
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