Italy Agrees to Allow I.M.F. to Monitor Its Progress on Debt

Acceding to pressure from European leaders, Italy “invited” the International Monetary Fund to look over its shoulder to ensure that Rome is carrying out reforms devised to keep the country from succumbing to Europe’s widening sovereign debt crisis, European Union officials said Friday.In an extraordinary move, Italy said it had offered to allow the fund to scrutinize its books every three months to make sure a $75 billion austerity package is carried out according to plan.

Standard Chartered CEO: Financial Stability Still In The Distance

WASHINGTON (Dow Jones)--The Group of 20 industrial and developing nations should focus more on new threats to financial stability rather than look backward for the reasons that caused the financial crisis, Peter Sands, chief executive of Standard Chartered PLC (SNTDF, STAN.LN), said Friday.

"Clearly we haven't achieved financial stability.... There has been too much fighting the last war rather than dealing with the threats facing us going forward," Sands said at a panel in Washington assessing the work of the Financial Stability Board, the body that advises the G-20 on financial reform.

How Europe can restore financial stability

With last week’s tumult in Italian markets, the European financial crisis has entered a new and far more dangerous phase, threatening both European monetary integration and the global recovery. Last week’s drama surrounding bond auctions in Europe’s third-leading economy should convince even the most hardened bureaucrat that the world can no longer let policy responses be shaped by dogma, bureaucratic agenda and expediency. It is to be hoped that European officials can engineer a decisive change in direction, but if not the world can no longer afford the deference that the International Monetary Fund and non-European Group of 20 officials have shown European policymakers the past 15 months.