But the damage to the reputation of the single currency would be far worse.Jousting knights at Royal BankRadio silence from Royal Bank of Scotland even though it is now an open secret that Sir Tom McKillop is departing AstraZeneca to take over from Sir George Mathewson as chairman. In the past, a spot of devaluation would have been enough to put Italian industry back on its feet, but that option is long gone.There are plenty of other reasons for Italy’s poor economic performance but Mr Berlusconi plays to the political gallery when he criticises the euro. The euro may not have quite screwed everyone, but it certainly hasn’t helped Italy, which went through a painful adjustment just to gain entry in the first place. The country has now been pushed into its second recession in as many years, partly because Italy finds itself stuck with an interest rate that is too high for domestic circumstances. Prodi is comfortably ahead in the polls.The euro stumbled and then recovered because nobody seriously expects Italy to leave the eurozone any time soon. Indeed, despite his frequent criticisms of the euro, Mr Berlusconi recently said it would be both impossible and inconvenient to revert to the lira.Nevertheless, in the aftermath of the no votes in France and the Netherlands, his comments have touched a nerve and raised fresh concerns about the long-term stability of European monetary union.

Well, now its successor, the euro, has got its own back and “screwed everybody”, according at least to the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.Mr Berlusconi’s remark was intended to make political not economic capital since it was directed at his opponent in next year’s elections, Romano Prodi, who as Italian leader took the lira into the single currency in the first place. Had this been an Anglo-Saxon business, then Herr Schrempp would have said auf wiedersehen a long time ago.Berlusconi falls out of love with euroF*** the lira, Richard Nixon famously once said when told about some crisis or other affecting the Italian currency. The irony of Herr Schrempp’s departure is that it coincides with the first bit of good news in a long time. Against the odds, Mercedes reported a small second-quarter profit.But after the damage that has been inflicted in the past eight years, it will take a lot more than one-quarter’s improvement to turn the business around.

The A-class, Mercedes’ attempt to enter the super-mini segment of the market, failed the Moose test, the M-class proved an ugly and overweight addition to the sports utility sector and early this year the disease reached what was once the banker of the product range with the recall of more than a million E-class saloons. In short, the Mercedes brand has gone from being revered to reviled. The familiar three-pointed star no longer shines as it once did.Quite why the Daimler supervisory board finally decided that now was the “optimal time” to say goodbye to its chief executive for the past 17 years remains unclear given that he was not due to step down until 2008 and had resisted prior calls to go. The product strategy has proved as poor as the corporate one.

The attempt to create a new brand in the shape of the Smart car has resembled a slow motion car crash Losses stand at €2.5bn and counting. That has not been the only spot of bother under the Daimler bonnet. Daimler reversed out of the deal three years later but not before more pain had been inflicted. But if he was contrite, he did not show it one bit and hung on with the support of an unholy alliance of his chairman, the unions and Deutsche Bank.The ill-judged Chrysler merger, was just one mistake It was followed by a rescue of Japan’s Mitsubishi. Herr Schrempp had no one to blame but himself, having thrown out most of the Chrysler top brass within 12 months of the so-called merger of equals.

The merger, a monument to both the Schrempp ego and German industrial arrogance, was a disaster from the start. The deal destroyed half the value of the company and within three years drove Daimler into the biggest loss in German corporate history. “It could be years before DaimlerChrysler gets out of its mess,” wrote Spiegel online.. The tear-stained letter that DaimlerChrysler’s 385,000 employees received yesterday from their chief executive was J?n Schrempp’s way of saying thank you for helping him to leave the business in such good heart after 44 years of “precious service”. In truth, it is the car maker’s shareholders who owe Herr Schrempp a bigger debt of gratitude for finally agreeing to quit two years before his contract expires. The 10 per cent rise in the share price that greeted the announcement says all that really needs to be said about the market’s verdict on the Schrempp era.
Almost from the moment he bulldozed through the value-destroying merger of Mercedes Benz and Chrysler of the US in 1998, the company began to hit trouble.