The forward-looking institutional safeguards put in place by the monetary union’s founding fathers were laid down in the Maastricht Treaty and the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP). The Maastricht Treaty prohibits monetary financing and central bank lending to the public sector, stipulates a no-bail-out clause and spells out fiscal rules regarding deficit and debt ceilings.
Let me now turn briefly to purely statistical issues. As I mentioned, the Bank of Italy has regularly published the country’s financial accounts (stocks and flows) since the 1960s; yearly stocks have been reconstructed for the main institutional sectors as far back as 1950. Below is the first statistical manual we published in 1969.