In the early hours of Thursday morning, July 16, the Greek Parliament passed a host of austerity measures in order to begin talks on a potential third bailout of 86 billion euros. The austerity measures were pushed onto the Parliament by Greece’s six-month-old leftist government of Syriza, elected in late January with a single mandate to oppose austerity.
Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek finance minister, in an article in the Guardian entitled “Germany won’t spare Greek pain – it has an interest in breaking us”, frames the Greek tragedy in clear terms thus:
A historic betrayal has consumed Greece. Having set aside the mandate of the Greek electorate, the Syriza government has willfully ignored last week’s landslide “No” vote and secretly agreed a raft of repressive, impoverishing measures in return for a “bailout” that means sinister foreign control and a warning to the world.
Thomas Piketty, author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century (source)by Gaius PubliusThis is yet another piece about Greece, much shorter, but long on irony served cold.
Neoliberalism, the privatization and commoditization of everything that moves, has experienced a great run over the past three decades, jump-started in the 1980s by PM Thatcher and President Reagan, christened in 1951 by Milton Friedman.
I’m no economist but I have been wondering how Syriza plans to bypass German-imposed austerity as long as it sticks with the euro. Depressed economies recover by devaluing their currency so that they can become more competitive. But Greece is currently tied to the euro, which means it cannot devalue and must continue to compete, despite its deathbed economy, against far larger and stronger economies like Germany’s.
“They just wanted to take a bat to them,” said former U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, referring to the attitude of European leaders towards debt-laden Greece in February of 2010, three months before the country’s first bailout. Mr. Geithner, Treasury Secretary from 2009 until 2013, was attending a meeting of the finance ministers and central bankers of the Group of Seven (G7) nations: the United States, Japan, Germany, France, Britain, Italy and Canada.
Edward Harrisonby KenI encountered Edward Harrison's cute little graph in Ian Welsh's June 25 post, "Greece and the Emperor's New Clothes," in which Ian noted that a commenter, markfromireland, had pointe
The State Department's Victoria Nuland explains to Greek President Tsipras that there are certain lines he won't be permitted to cross. by Gaius PubliusWhen it comes to coverage of the Greek crisis, there's no better source than Naked Capitalism.
