That is a rhetorical question I have been asking myself.  Rejecting austerity, as the Italian voters appear to have done, is to reject an economy killing program.  Should be good, right?  Well, of course not.  As the Yahoo! Daily Ticker explains in the article Why Italy’s Election Has Caused Global Markets to Crater:

The ECB says it will buy government’s debt, provided that said government engages in various reforms that the ECB wants to see.

There’s only one catch. Voters hate austerity. And voters hate when their own politicians are taking their cues from an institution like the European Central Bank, rather than domestic needs.

And that’s the phenomenon that came home to roost last night.

The political parties seen as continuing along the existing ECB-preferred path did badly. The rebellion voters (Silvio Berlusconi and populist Beppe Grillo) did much better than expected.

And this has the potential to undermine all of the progress made in Europe over the past several months.

So the real problem is that The European Central Bank will only do what it ought to do, inject liquidity into the sovereign debt market, if the countries receiving the injection will do what they ought not do, go on an austerity program.

Just as in the US, there’s a big thirst among elites for structural reforms to reduce long-term deficits.

Well, that’s not the real reason elites want structural reform.  Applying Greenberg’s Law of Counterproductive Behavior, the real explanation could be that the elites want the markets to tank to create a buying opportunity for them.  That way they can buy up whatever assets they don’t already own at fire sale prices.  What else are corporations sitting on several trillion dollars of liquid assets waiting for?