The consequences of last week's major market moves were by turns high-profile and obscure; one oxymoron-inclined senior White House advisor to President Donald Trump insisted the inverted curve that appeared briefly in U.S. Treasury yields was in fact "flat," while the Austrian 100-year bond continued to trade at more than twice its face value.
Those two political groupings, known as Lega and the Five Star Movement , eventually struck a deal to form an unlikely coalition government. But their combined campaign promises of higher spending and lower taxes frightened both the market and the European Commission, which has closely monitored the Italian economy and its expensively-serviced debt pile since the euro zone crisis.
Originally a separatist movement that sought to build a new nationalist and pro-business economy from the rump of Italy's northern industrial heartland, Lega only recently switched from criticizing southern Italians to demonizing immigrants. Several of the ambitious objectives the two coalition partners agreed to in their government contract had placed them on collision course with Brussels, where the European Commission was focused on reducing Rome's overall debt pile and tamping down its annual deficit.