Italy gets a new government – the eurozone hokey-cokey is on hold for now

Markets freaked out when Italy seemed to be heading for fresh elections. But now the populist coalition is taking charge after all. John Stepek looks at what’s going on.

At the start of the week, Italy looked like it was heading for fresh elections.

The president had blocked the appointment of a eurosceptic finance minister (imagine Philip Hammond, except he wants to leave the EU). As a result, the two populist parties trying to form a coalition had stormed out.

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John Stepek

John Stepek is a senior reporter at Bloomberg News and a former editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He graduated from Strathclyde University with a degree in psychology in 1996 and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.

He started out in journalism by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms. In 2003, he took a job on the finance desk of Teletext, where he spent two years covering the markets and breaking financial news.

His work has been published in Families in Business, Shares magazine, Spear's Magazine, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator among others. He has also appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. His first book, on contrarian investing, The Sceptical Investor, was released in March 2019. You can follow John on Twitter at @john_stepek.