(18 Nov 2011)
1. Wide of Chamber of Deputies, Italian parliament's lower house
2. Italian Prime Minister, Mario Monti, taking his seat
3. Wide of Chamber of Deputies in session
4. SOUNDBITE (Italian) Mario Monti, Italian Prime Minister:
"I'm convinced too that a good part of the financial, then economical, now social, and in part political, crisis affecting the world, and Europe and Italy in particular, was caused by extremely serious faults by the financial institutions and the financial markets."
5. Wide of Monti standing in Chamber of Deputies
6. Cutaway of members of parliament
7. SOUNDBITE (Italian) Mario Monti, Italian Prime Minister:
"This morning I saw a group of school children watching the workings of our parliament and I thought that... maybe not this parliament that is very responsible and did an important job of improving public finances... what are those children going to think if we tell them that it was the rest of the world that got us into trouble, and not decisions made for decades by our own parliaments and governments, maybe with the best intentions, but in times when there was little attention to public spending."
8. Wide of Chamber of Deputies
9. SOUNDBITE (Italian) Mario Monti, Italian Prime Minister:
"When I blocked the merger between two huge American companies, even the US president intervened to put pressure on me, and 'The Economist' wrote: 'The US finance world considers Mario Monti the Saddam Hussein of finance'."
10. Various of screens showing latest financial data
STORYLINE:
The new Italian Prime Minister addressed the Italian Parliament's lower chamber on Friday, as deputies began deliberations ahead of a confidence vote for the new technocratic government formed in an attempt to save the country from its debt crisis.
On Thursday, Mario Monti's day-old government won a confidence vote 281-25 in the Senate, after he warned that all Italians would need to make sacrifices to get the country out of its massive debt hole, while promising to fairly distribute the pain.
During that vote, anti-austerity rioters clashed with police in Rome, Milan and Turin, among other cities.
On Friday, no clashes were reported in the hours leading up to Friday's confidence vote in the Chamber of Deputies.
Monti was recently chosen to lead the country after Italy's spiralling financial crisis doomed Silvio Berlusconi's three and a half year government.
Monti is under enormous pressure to boost growth and bring down Italy's high debt, not only to save Italy from succumbing to the debt crisis but to prevent a catastrophic disintegration of the common euro currency.
In his speech to parliament on Friday he said he was convinced that the "political crisis affecting the world, and Europe and Italy in particular, was caused by extremely serious faults by the financial institutions and the financial markets."
He also discussed his halting, as the then European Competition Commissioner, of the merger of US companies General Electric and Honeywell in 2001, saying that the US President at the time, George W. Bush, tried to put pressure on his decision.
Europe has already bailed out three small countries, Greece, Ireland and Portugal, but the Italian economy, the third largest in the 17-nation eurozone, is deemed too big for Europe to rescue.
Borrowing costs on 10-year Italian bonds were at 6.75 percent on Friday, after spiking briefly at over 7 percent Thursday, a level that had forced those other countries into bailouts.
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