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SuperMario Draghi, will the man who saved the euro really arrive?

There is no international newspaper, European in particular, that does not have the name of this morning Mario Draghi on the front page. Without needing to explain who he is. He is known to the political and economic world, he is the man who saved the euro. It is difficult to think of a more authoritative and expendable name than his in the international field for President Mattarella. And the markets immediately welcomed it with an immediate lowering of the spread, the difference between the value of Italian and German government bonds.

He’s the man who made ends meet, the man who prevented the single currency from sinking, while recounting that in his degree thesis he had written that it was not the time for that coin. He told this when he was governor of the Bank of Italy, during his lectio magistralis at the inauguration of the 100th academic year of the Faculty of Economics of Sapienza, in 2006. “It was about the single currency and I concluded that the single currency was madness, a what absolutely not to do… ». He smiled and everyone else.

The numbers were in the Draghi family, but at the time of that degree in Economics, it was 1970, Mario had already lost both parents. When he was 15, he quickly lost both parents. His father Carlo had worked in the Bank of Italy and in the Bnl, he died in 1963.

To take care of him, his sister Andreina and his brother Marcello, an aunt. With his brother he studied with the Jesuits at the Massimiliano Massimo high school in Rome, the city where he was born on September 3, 1947. Graduating with Federico Caffè, a Keynesian, one of the most important economists in Italy, who mysteriously disappeared. For Draghi his studies continue at MIT di Boston with the Nobel laureate Franco Modigliani.

His career began overseas with a post as executive director of the World Bank. Guido Carli calls him to treasure, in via XX Settembre he spends 10 years in a way he likes: diplomatic and academic together. After he moved to the Bank of Italy, three years in Goldman Sachs and then to European Central Bank. This is where he did his masterpiece: managing economic stimuli to prevent speculation leading to the end of the single currency. It was 2011, in Italy there was another Mario (Monti) and a new technical government. Just to remember historical courses and resorts.

The motto has become famous: “Whatever it takes“Whatever it takes” for the euro to resist speculation. In the end everyone likes it, cleared through customs by Angela Merkel but at the beginning because the Italian driver’s license didn’t like it. There picture he wrote that Draghi was that of the lira: “for memory: this was the coin with an infinite number of zeros”. “Mario Draghi: more dangerous than Kim Jong-Il” wrote the Telegraph.

Mario Draghi is one of courage, already Super Mario, who often remembered what his father said. “At the turn of the wars, in Germany, my father saw an inscription on a monument. It was written: if you have lost your money you have not lost anything, because with a good deal you can recover it; if you have lost your honor, you have lost a lot, but with a heroic act you can get it back; but if you have lost the courage, you have lost everything ».

It took courage to save the euro, perhaps more to get Italy out of the pandemic by managing the recovery fund well. It is not a man to back down. The Corriere della Sera he recalls one of his last speeches at the Catholic University, in October 2019, he hoped «that many students of this university will decide one day to put their skills to public service. If you decide to do so, I have no doubt that you will encounter significant obstacles, as happens to all policy makers. There will be mistakes and withdrawals because the world is complex. However, I hope that you will be comforted by the fact that in history decisions based on knowledge, courage and humility have always proved their quality ”.

Married with Serena Cappello, an expert in English literature, met at 19 in the Brenta area, has a private life that she has always kept that way. We saw him shopping and after the end of his assignment in Europe he said that for the future he had to ask his wife. He has two sons, Federica and Giacomo. She works in a biotech multinational and he is a financial trader at Morgan Stanley.

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