ROME (Reuters) - If Italy leaves the euro, it will be late on a Friday night.
Government officials will have planned the move in the utmost secrecy, telling their European partners only that same evening while simultaneously ordering the shutdown of banks and financial markets to prevent a stampede of capital out of the country.
This is “Italy’s Plan B”, an eye-popping contingency scenario drawn up by the team at a website specializing in economic issues, for how the euro zone’s third-largest economy should go about returning to the lira if necessary.
The 80-page pamphlet was overlooked when it first appeared in October 2015, and would ordinarily have stayed that way.
But then one of the best-known contributors to the website, 81-year-old economist Paolo Savona, was put forward last week as a candidate for economy minister under the new anti-establishment coalition between the right-wing League and the 5-Star Movement.
The government forged on Thursday has since relegated Savona to the more junior European affairs portfolio after the head of state refused to allow an arch euroskeptic to occupy the key economics ministry.
And inside the League, which is dominant in the wealthy Lombardy and Veneto regions in the north, sources say there are no signs of anxiety that leader Matteo Salvini would ever risk the chaos of pulling the country out of the single currency.
Nevertheless, “Plan B” remains on the list of compulsory reading for those seeking to understand the intellectual foundations of the new coalition.
Salvini in particular has been instrumental in bringing Savona and several other euroskeptic economists and their ideas out of intellectual obscurity and into the
