Tag Archives: Greece

It is my last blog post for the year. And we leave the year with not much gained from a progressive perspective. The mid-term elections in the US just swapped deficit-terrorist Republicans (who have been compromised by the big-spending Trump) with ridiculous PayGo Democrats, who are intent on repeating all their previous mistakes. The Brexit negotiations reveal how appallingly compromised the Tories have become and how venal the European Commission is. The British Labour Party fiscal rule...

Book Review Adam Tooze. Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World. Viking. New York. 2018 The global economic crisis is now more than a decade old, and is far from definitively behind us. Indeed, many fear, with good reason, that the recent, uneven and lethargic global recovery may soon come to an end, and that the next crisis of global capitalism could be even worse than that of 2008. The financial crisis and resulting crisis of the real global economy triggered by the...

Michael Calderbank speaks to Marxist economist Costas Lapavitsas ahead of the publication of his provocative new book The Left Case Against the EUCostas Lapavitsas  The book is obviously a critique of the EU as it stands. It’s an assessment of where the union is, what it has become, and its likely direction. It is an attempt to say that the left should have nothing to do with defending this set of institutions. It should assume a critical, rejectionist position. I am asserting that this is...

[embedded content] One country that symbolised the crisis of the last 10 years was Greece. Its insolvency embarked the country on a long regime of bail-outs and austerity. This August, Greece officially emerged from the crisis, with the OECD forecasting GDP growth again. So, did the austerity work? The former Greek finance minister and co-founder of the Democracy in Europe Movement (DiEM)...

I always find the views of former policymakers fascinating, not least because of their tendency to become much more outspoken once they are out of office. Some express much more radical views than they did while in office: Larry Summers springs to mind, and Adair Turner. Others become critical of the institutions that they ran: Mervyn King, for example. The latest former policymaker to reveal what he really thinks is Vítor Constâncio, Vice President of the ECB from 2010 to 2018. In a...

Backgrounder on Greece (and the IMF and Eurocrats). A sad tale of elite rule and rent extraction off the back of ordinary workers with no power or influence — unless they rise up angry and are willing to pursue it.Michael Roberts BlogGreece: on paroleMichael Roberts

New Brave Europe ha pubblicato questa risposta al pezzo di Marco Revelli su il manifesto che polemizzava con Mélenchon e con il mio articolo su Micromega, questo l'incipit: "Dare a Tsipras quel che è di Tsipras. Una sinistra incapace di riconoscere i propri punti di riferimento e di dar conto del loro merito, pur senza rinunciare al dovere di critica, è destinata alla fine miserevole che ha fatto. Tre anni fa tutti a sgomitare dietro ad «Alexis». Oggi va di moda l’accusa di...

ATHENS: A biblical calamity befell the Attica region last Monday. I saw its first sign in the late morning at Athens airport, where I was seeing off my daughter to Australia. A strong whiff of burning wood caused me to look up to the sky, where a whitish-yellow sun beckoned, surrounded by the tell-tale eclipse-like daytime darkness that only thick, sky-high smoke can cause. By the early evening the news had...

ATHENS – A biblical calamity befell Attica last Monday. I saw its first sign in the late morning at Athens airport, where I was seeing off my daughter to Australia. A strong whiff of burning wood caused me to look up to the sky, where a whitish-yellow sun beckoned, surrounded by the telltale eclipse-like daytime darkness that only thick, sky-high smoke can cause. By the early evening, the news began cascading...

 New Brave Europe ha tradotto e pubblicato il pezzo sulla Grecia già uscito su Micromega online. Grazie all'amico Methew Rose. Sergio Cesaratto – Tsipras’s tie. What moral can we draw from the Greek crisis? July 15, 2018 Klaus Regling, the head of the eurozone’s bailout fund and a German, concerning the most recent EU “debt relief” for Grecce: “It is the biggest act of solidarity that the world has ever seen” (Reglings motto seems to be:...