Greece’s economy has recovered modestly from the depths it hit at the peak of its crisis in 2014 and 2015, but with an unemployment rate that is still close to 19 percent, there hardly seems like great cause for celebration.
Dean Baker
HuffPost, September 15, 2017
An Interview with Mark Weisbrot, by Nacho Berdugo La Circular nº5 (Instituto25M), pp. 114–125
In a recent article aptly titled, “The Global Growth Funk,” Nouriel Roubini does what he does best: makes the case that the global economy is going to hell in a handbasket, and there is little that can be done about it. This is how he earned the nickname
Mark WeisbrotThe Nation, May 10, 2016
As ThePressProject reported in March, a memo in Hillary Clinton’s declassified emails reveals that the German government had been preparing for the possibility of the anti-austerity Syriza party being elected in Greece as early as May 2012. The memo, viewable through WikiLeaks’ Clinton email archive, illustrates the concern with which German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble viewed the prospect of a Greek exit from the eurozone (a “Grexit”) ahead of the June 2012 legislative election. Questioning Syriza’s commitment to the euro, Schäuble laid out two contingency plans to manage the scenario, neither of which would be favorable for Germany.
According to the memo, Schäuble and “other financial officials in Berlin, London, and Brussels” increasingly viewed the elections as a “plebiscite on whether or not Greece wants to remain in the Euro-zone” despite Syriza’s insistence on keeping Greece in the eurozone if elected. Schäuble, seeking to avoid a Grexit at all costs, proposed that Greek voters should “bear the consequences of their actions” if they ever elected a Syriza-led government. This was because Germany’s two options in the event of a Grexit would consist of either a “European Redemption Pact,” which the Merkel administration had long vehemently opposed, or a drastic shrinkage of the eurozone to expel every member with a budget deficit.
The first option would entail taking all debts owed by eurozone members that exceeded 60 percent of GDP and transferring them into a redemption fund financed by joint bonds issued by the currency union as a whole. As former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis points out, the plan would almost certainly have been rejected by Italy and Spain, who would have been forced to carry out austerity on the same scale as Greece for at least 20 years in order to meet target budget surpluses. Schäuble, viewing the proposal as the lesser of two evils, had warmed slightly to it and was attempting to persuade Merkel to consider it.
April 2016, David Rosnick
Mark WeisbrotBoston Review, March 1, 2016El Economista, March 10, 2016
