Italy’s government is pushing ahead with new laws challenging the central bank’s control of the country’s reserves. Rome is calling for public ownership of the nation’s gold.
The ruling coalition of the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement and the League parties proposed two bills that have evoked nationwide controversy over the country’s long-standing financial and monetary system. One draft law may, reportedly, oblige the central bank’s owners to sell their shares to the Italian Treasury at prices from the 1930s, while the second law is set to declare Italian nationals to be the owners of the Bank of Italy’s reserves. Source: RT
- A movement supporting reparations as a way to make amends for the atrocities of slavery and to reduce the persistent wealth gap is gaining momentum.
- One hundred and forty-two members of Congress support H.R. 40, the bill to study reparations.
- William Darity, professor of public policy at Duke University, estimates a concrete program could cost the U.S. government between $10 trillion and $12 trillion. Source CNBC
The House passed President Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus plan early Saturday in a nearly party-line vote, advancing a sweeping pandemic aid package that would provide billions of dollars for unemployed Americans, struggling families and businesses, schools and the distribution of coronavirus vaccines. Source MSN
Exxon Mobil erased almost every drop of oil-sands crude from its books in a sweeping revision of worldwide reserves to depths never before seen in the company’s modern history.
Exxon counted the equivalent of 15.2 billion barrels of reserves as of Dec. 31, down from 22.44 billion a year earlier, according to a regulatory filing on Wednesday. The company’s reserves of the dense, heavy crude extracted from Western Canada’s sandy bogs dropped by 98%. Source World OIl
