De Grauwe, Paul, (2015) “Are creditors pushing Greece deliberately into default?”, 28 April. The Greek drama has entered its endgame. The Greek government has to repay loans to the IMF and other public institutions in the near future but does not have the cash to do so. The lenders refuse to come forward in providing liquidity as long as the Greek government does not accept the conditions they impose. We …Read More
Heise, Michael, (2015), “Ireland’s Lessons for Greece”, www.project-syndicate.org, 23 April. Greece’s government, led by the left-wing Syriza party, is demanding a new deal from its European creditors, claiming that the bailout program provided by the “troika” (the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, and the European Commission) has plunged their country into a spiral of deflation and austerity. But, while no one disputes that things have gone wrong in …Read More
Ozlem Onaran (2015) “Should Greece Pay Back Its Debt?“, Social Europe Journal, 23 April 2015. Financial speculators are nervously asking whether Greece will pay its debt or default. Political leaders from Europe to the US and the IMF are telling the Greek government to leave aside its democratic mandate and accept further austerity as a condition for getting credit to continue to pay back its debt. But the right …Read More
Auerback, M. (2015) “The Greek Crisis: Time to Rethink the Concept of “Money“, Institute for New Economic Thinking, 07 March. As the economies of Europe stagger, and Greece in particular staggers under the weight of a depression exceeding in scale the devastation of the 1930s, it appears difficult to see a way out of this agonizing cycle of repeated financial meltdowns. In fact, there are creative ways to solve …Read More
Jerry, J. (2015) “‘Foreign’ Money and ‘Austerity’ Haven’t Caused Greek Stagnation“, Real Clear Markets News Site, 26 February. The on-going “Greek Financial Crisis” is chock full of lessons about the nature of the entity that serves the functions of money in an economy. Historically, people have chosen to use as money everything from notched wooden sticks to metal coins to pieces of paper printed by governments. When alternatives have …Read More
Michael Hudson says Greece’s Finance Minister Varoufakis is proposing austerity on the banking class rather than on the working class to balance the budget. SHARMINI PERIES, EXEC. PRODUCER, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Sharmini Peries, coming to you from Baltimore. The four-month extension secured by the Greek finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, on Friday came with the condition that Greece provide a list of measures to quell …Read More
Stiglitz, J. (2015) “A Greek Morality Tale“, Social Europe Journal, 04 February. When the euro crisis began a half-decade ago, Keynesian economists predicted that the austerity that was being imposed on Greece and the other crisis countries would fail. It would stifle growth and increase unemployment – and even fail to decrease the debt-to-GDP ratio. Others – in the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and a few universities …Read More
Krugman, P. (2015) “The Greek Stand-By Arrangement“, The New York Times, 25 January. For tomorrow’s column I went back to the original, May 2010 stand-by arrangement for Greece, to see what the troika was demanding and predicting at the beginning of the austerity push, and how it compares with what actually happened. First of all, I quite often encounter people who claim that Greece never really did austerity. I …Read More
Gros, Daniel, (2015), “Grexit 2015: A primer”, CEPS Commentaries, 23 January. In the run-up to the Greek elections on January 25th and the subsequent renegotiation of the country’s economic adjustment programme with the troika, Daniel Gros writes in this Commentary that “nobody officially wants Grexit”: not Syriza, which wants Greece to stay in the euro. It is ‘only’ asking for a reduction in Greece’s official debt and an end to …Read More
Otero Iglesias, Μ. (2015) “We should be wary of removing the ECB from the troika to facilitate the use of outright monetary transactions“, LSE EUROPP, 19 January. A key legal debate in the context of the Eurozone crisis is whether so called ‘Outright Monetary Transactions’(OMT), which would allow the European Central Bank (ECB) to buy unlimited numbers of government bonds in secondary markets, are compatible with European law. The …Read More
