Presentation at the Italian Senate building, Rome, February 7, 2018

Thursday is my last teaching day in Helsinki. The Tour moves onto Dublin tomorrow where I hope to learn a lot about the implications of the recent Irish election where Sinn Féin came out of nowhere, as they say, to gain the most votes by some margin and 37 seats, only one less than right-wing conservative party Fianna Fáil and two more than the other right-wing conservative party, the ruling Fine Gael. I have various meetings coming up in Helsinki on Thursday as I finish up this year’s Helsinki visit (although I will be back in June for other commitments). So today I am publishing the video of my presentation at the Italian Senate last Friday (February 7, 2020).

This visit to Rome last week was at the invitation of – Senator Gianluigi Paragone – who entered the Senate as a member of the Five Star Movement, but at the start of this year left the Party and is now an independent.

He was excluded by the M5S because he voted against the Government’s 2020 fiscal law.

I spoke on the theme ‘MMT: A new paradigm in economics to get us out of crisis’.

The event was held in collaboration with Nuovo Direzione and the venue was the Italian Senate building – the Palazzo Giustiniani, Rome.

The date was Friday, February 7, 2020.

The video goes for about 35:25 minutes.

The video footage and audio was kindly supplied by Enrico Cavaglia from Rome.

And Thomas Fazi provided the interpreting services for the event. The video cuts all the Italian interpreting out and that is why there are a lot of cuts and you see Thomas occasionally.

Sequential translation like this is the hardest format for a speaker because one has to stop every few sentences or so and then try to keep the thread going after the translation is finished.

The speaker has to avoid the use of colloquialisms and mostly refrain from jokes because they lose immediacy in this format.

So if the presentation appears somewhat stilted and without humour that is why.

The audio is very ‘spacy’ but that is mostly due to the old room I was speaking in. I could only massage so much of the echo out of the original.

That is enough for today!

(c) Copyright 2020 William Mitchell. All Rights Reserved.