By Amitabh Pal, June 16, 2011 The global austerity agenda is encountering a hurdle in Greece: The Greek people aren’t prepared to put up with forced deprivation. In order to have loans to foreign creditors made good, international institutions, led by the European Union, are demanding ever-harsher assaults on Greek society. But the Greek people have fought back, protesting in huge numbers and causing the ne ...

Next financial crisis is in public services by Serge Halimi, March 2010 States rescued the banks in country after country, neither asking nor getting anything in return. The banks are now using their newfound strength against the state, threatening to reveal the accounting tricks the banks themselves had recommended to hide some of the debt. After all, interest rates on loans are higher when the financial r ...

By LOUISE STORY, LANDON THOMAS Jr. and NELSON D. SCHWARTZ February 14, 2010 Wall Street tactics akin to the ones that fostered subprime mortgages in America have worsened the financial crisis shaking Greece and undermining the euro by enabling European governments to hide their mounting debts. As worries over Greece rattle world markets, records and interviews show that with Wall Street’s help, the nation e ...

NRC Handelsblad 29.05.2011 by Ingeborg Beugel. Heus, Grieken werken 41 uur per week en zijn niet verder uit te persen De vooroordelen tegen Griekenland hebben groteske vormen aangenomen. Welke Nederlander heeft drie banen om de eindjes aan elkaar te knopen? De gewone Griek krijgt de rekening betaald voor het falende beleid van de Griekse elite, betoogt Ingeborg Beugel. Voor hoe de meerderheid van de Nederla ...

For over a year, Deutsche Bank and the ECB made us believe that a Greek default would be disastrous for Europe. They were lying through their teeth. In Frankfurt, two of Europe’s most powerful men sit virtually across the street from one another in the high-rise headquarters of two of the continent’s most important institutions. No one elected these men to rule over us. No one voted for their institutions t ...

LATE one night in September 2008, as the financial world trembled,Josef Ackermannreceived an urgent call from Berlin. On the line was Angela Merkel, the German chancellor. She needed his help — now. A big German bank was about to collapse, much the way Lehman Brothers had only days before. It was 12:45 a.m. and shaky financial markets were about to open across Asia. Fear was in the air. Mrs. Merkel asked wh ...

By Jérôme E. Roos In just three years, Iceland went from collapse to revolution and back to growth. What can Spain and Greece learn from the Icelandic experience and its embrace of direct democracy? Just two or three years after its economy and government collapsed, Iceland is bouncing back with remarkable strength. This week, the small island nation earned praise from foreign investors despite allowing its ...

By Vidya Ram London, Dec. 10 With all the focus on the crisis in the euro zone and whether Spain and Portugal could follow Ireland and Greece in turning to the International Monetary Fund, it is easy to forget about one of the first nations to fall victim to the financial crisis – Iceland. For a while the country was the symbol of the financial crisis, as it allowed its banking system, lumbered under huge f ...

I was just asked to prepare a shortened version (600 words) of the Modest Proposal for publication in the UK Government Gazette. Since some of you may be interested in a handier, punchier version, here it is: It is now abundantly clear that each and every response by the eurozone to the galloping sovereign debt crisis has been consistently underwhelming. The reason is simple: The eurozone is facing an escal ...

‎"...But the reality is just the opposite: creditor-friendly policies are crippling the economy. This is a negative-sum game, in which the attempt to protect the rentiers from any losses is inflicting much larger losses on everyone else. And the only way to get a real recovery is to stop playing that game". Learn more.   The latest economic data have dashed any hope of a quick end to America’s job drou ...