Part of the gold and currency reserves of the Bank of Italy will be used to attack Italy’s enormous national debt, currently the equivalent of 107 per cent of GNP, according to a resolution approved by parliament on Tuesday as part of Romano Prodi’s coalition government’s “Document of Economic and Financial Programming” for 2008-2011, the basis for the 2008 budget legislation which must be approved within 2007.

The resolution commits the government to “Undertake, also in its relations with the European Union, a survey of all instruments useful to producing a significant reduction of the national debt, through agreed ways of using the reserves of the central banks, in gold and currency, in excess of that required by the agreement with the ECB for the defence of the Euro.”