"Grillonomics" Beppe Grillo Exchanges Emails with Krugman, Calls on Stiglitz and Fitoussi to Create Five-Star Economic Plan

Beppe Grillo's anti-corruption, eurosceptic, Five Star Movement (M5S) is now the largest political party in Italy.

Enter "Grillonomics"

Via Google translate from French, Les Echos reports Fitoussi and Stiglitz are working on the economic program of Beppe Grillo.

All eyes are beginning to converge on the "economic program" Beppe Grillo, still limited to a page and a half on the site M5S.

With Italian economist Mauro Gallegati acting as coordinator, Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and French economist Jean-Paul Fitoussi were called on to help formulate the economic doctrine M5S.

"To move from protest to proposal, the first step is to get studying. In this context, I am trying to organize a task force of academics begin to teach the newly elected" said economist Mauro Gallegati, an economics professor at the University of Ancona.

"Bruce Greenwald of Columbia University in New York and Jean-Paul Fitoussi will give me a hand," says Gallegati who rejects the label of "Beppe Grillo's Economic Guru." The real "sponsor" of M5S's economic program, based on the decay and the development of clean energy, is mainly Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz (Columbia University), with Bruce Greenwald as one of the closest staff.

Paul Krugman has also maintained a dialogue with Beppe Grillo for several years.

Globalization, Guaranteed Income, Debt Reductions

"Globalization as has been managed seems a pact with the devil. We can ensure that globalization works, not only for the rich and powerful, but for everyone" said a message posted on the M5S blog with a link to a Stiglitz video "Make Globalization Work".

Grillo supports a concept of a guaranteed "citizenship income" for all, whose cost is estimated at between 20 and 30 billion euros.

M5S advocates "reducing the debt through strong interventions on the cost of the State with the fight against waste and the use of new technologies to make the citizen access to information and services without the need for intermediaries." It also provides for the abolition of stock options and cascades of holding for listed companies.

That is a substantially Mish-modified translation from French. I am not sure what "cascades of holding for listed companies" means.

It will be interesting to see what this collection of economists comes up with, because Grillo is eurosceptic and I doubt those whose advice Grillo seeks are in the same camp.

One thing is for sure: austerity is likely to head out the window, and that will cause fits in Brussels and Germany.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com