Trichet and Draghi dispatched their secret letter at one of the most urgent moments of the eurozone crisis. Intense speculation against the sovereign debt of peripheral eurozone countries was raising fears of a collapse of the euro. Interest rates on Italy’s sovereign debt had shot above 6 percent, threatening the government’s solvency.

If Italy had had its own currency, its central bank would have put an end to the speculation by simply buying up government bonds; just one day earlier, in fact, the European Central Bank had announced it would begin doing exactly that for the equally troubled Irish and Portuguese economies. Immediately after the announcement, the two countries’ bond markets stabilized.

But ECB president Jean-Claude Trichet wasn’t satisfied with Italy’s economic policies. So, along with Mario Draghi (Italy’s central bank governor and Trichet’s already designated successor at the ECB), Trichet drafted this letter to Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, laying out the bank’s demands: these were the policies Italy needed to adopt if it wanted its economy to be rescued.