Tag Archives: Spain

A PLOG is a ´Persistent Large Output Gap´. Read: a long period of high unemployment. Literature about PLOGs tries to mitigate one of the ideas of economic orthodoxy, especially the unsubstantiated idea that lowering high post-economic crisis unemployment will fuel inflation. According to this literature, which is quite empirical, it doesn´t. However, this somewhat older literature does not yet consider the post-2009 Euro Area experience. Here, I will propose an updated definition of...

And their central banks can buy unlimited amounts to support the price. Not that they would do that… Europe’s debtors must pawn their gold for Eurobond Redemption By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard May 29 (Telegraph) — The German scheme — known as the European Redemption Pact — offers a form of “Eurobonds Lite” that can be squared with the German constitution and breaks the political logjam. It is a highly creative way out of the debt crisis, but is not a soft option for Italy,...

Here is to another crisis like this one! Paper co-authored with Esteban Pérez that was a Levy Institute working paper is published. From the abstract: The Spanish crisis is generally portrayed as resulting from excessive spending by households associated to a housing bubble and/or an excessive welfare spending beyond the economic possibilities of the country. We put forward a different hypothesis. We argue that the Spanish crisis resulted, in the main, from a widening deficit position...

A recent twitter exchange with some Europhiles who believe that it is better to wait for some, as yet unspecified, incremental reform process for the Eurozone rather than precipitate exit and the restoration of currency sovereignty was summed up for me by one of the tweets from Andrew Watt. In trying to defend the abandonment of sovereignty and make a case for continuing with the so-called reform dialogue, he wrote (October 27, 2017): “Unemployment in “periphery” was v hi before €. Fell...

Backgrounder on Spain and Catalonia. The intractability of the political problem is that Catalonia – the most European of all Spanish regions and historically in favor of republicanism and federalism – contests the very essence of the Spanish system. To scrap this outdated constitution – written immediately after Franco’s demise and drenched in amnesty for Franco-ists – is as important as self-determination. To say that the Bourbons face a legitimacy crisis is a major understatement....

Fascist Franco may have been dead for more than four decades, but Spain is still encumbered with his dictatorial corpse. A new paradigm has been coined right inside the lofty European Union, self-described home/patronizing dispenser of human rights to lesser regions across the planet: “In the name of democracy, refrain from voting, or else.” Call it democracy nano-Franco style. Nano-Franco is Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, whose heroic shock troops were redeployed from a serious...

State fascism rearing its ugly head again in Spain?SouthFront Thousands Protest In Barselona Over Police Violence During Catalan Independence Referendum lkb22 IndependentSpanish anti-separatists in Madrid protest with fascist arm salutes while singing far-right song Natasha Salmon ReutersSerbia accuses world of double standards over Catalonia and Kosovo More paradoxes of liberalism.

This is a major myth pushed by the cultural left and regressive left these days: that Spain in the period of Muslim rule was some kind of multicultural paradise and beacon of Enlightenment in Dark Age Europe. That myth is completely shattered by this book:Fernandez-Morera, Dario. 2016. The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise: Muslims, Christians, and Jews under Islamic Rule in Medieval Spain. ISI Books, Wilmington, Deleware. See this interview of Dario Fernandez-Morera here:[embedded content]See...

The management of the economic crisis has had devastating consequences for our country, as well as for the eurozone as a whole. The fiscal austerity and wage reduction policies imposed over the last few years have unnecessarily prolonged the recession across the continent and generated deep social fractures by increasing economic and social inequalities.Fiscal austerity and wage reduction policies have led us to a lost decade. Across the Eurozone, we haven’t yet regained pre-crisis level of...

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