Tag Archives: Greece

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:...

Three years ago, today, the people of Greece staged a rebellion against their debt bondage. Though this rebellion was overthrown from within almost immediately, it remains a remarkable testimony to the power of a people to say No to the oligarchy, to wrestle control of the narrative of their circumstances from the inanely authoritarian elites, and to overcome the fear which a tiny minority uses to take the demos...

ATHENS – Europe’s establishment is luxuriating in two recent announcements that would have been momentous even if they were only partly accurate: The end of Greece’s debt crisis, and a Franco-German accord to redesign the eurozone. Unfortunately, both reports offer fresh proof of the European Union establishment’s remarkable talent for never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity. The two announcements...

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Greece’s Business Prospects Brighten After Lost Decade. Or so says the Wall Street Journal. I fail to see how. And the graph below is their illustration. Note that the reason for the brighter situation is merely that it has stopped falling. I had a similar graph not long ago comparing it just with the Depression in the US.

After successfully quashing Greece’s 2015 debtor’s prison break, Europe’s deep establishment has embarked on a mission to declare the country’s economic and social crisis over. To recall Tacitus, “they make a desert and they call it peace”. Since 2015, the Greek state has paid its creditors a sum equal to the aggregate pre-tax revenues of all Greek businesses over an 18-month period. And as if these pounds of...

The state of permanent debt bondage, which threatens Greece with desertification, is in the mind of every Greek. Imposing emigration on our young, and indignity to those who stay behind, it hangs over the country like a thick, dark cloud. Unable to discern any light in the long night of our Great Depression, the Greeks’ humiliation is reinforced every time they hear the powers-that-be tell them, gleefully, that...

Perhaps the best known and respected conservative German economist, Hans-Werner Sinn (Munich University and for many years Chair of Ifo Institute), had this to say in reaction to the claims of various troika officials that I cost Greece billions of euros: “Yanis Varoufakis has acted very prudently and wisely to defend Greek interests… Arguing, conversely, that his policies cost the Greek state money is an absurd...

Thomas Wieser’s claim that Yanis Varoufakis and the Greek government of 2015 cost their economy 200 billion euros is ludicrous. As Wieser knows – because he was one of the architects of the policy – the Greek economy in 2015 was strangled by its creditors. The creditors inflicted severe damage from the first day: by undermining liquidity of the bank system, refusing to restructure the debt, insisting on harsh...