Article • Dean Baker’s Beat the Press
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This piece of information should have been included in a Washington Post article on the European-IMF bailout plan for Greece. At one point the article quotes from a German newspaper editorial: “most Germans struggle to understand why they should be paying for the Greeks, who are broke because they squandered their money.” It would have been helpful to point out to readers that this money is allowing Greece to continue to make payments to foreign creditors, a list which includes German banks. In other words, the money going from Germany to Greece is in part money going from German taxpayers to German banks. This fact should have been noted in the article.