Nearly 86 percent of private investors have agreed to join in the debt-swap deal that will help Greece avoid an uncontrolled default. But is that good news? Many experts have their doubts. In a SPIEGEL ONLINE interview, economics professor Harald Hau argues that not only will the plan put the burden on taxpayers, but it will mean an even bigger crisis to come. SPIEGEL ONLINE: Almost 86 percent of private-se ...

Neoliberal economics planned in Brussels and Berlin will push Greece into third-world working conditions. The reporting of the Greek tragedy over the last couple of years gives the impression that economics is a master science. Yet, the mainstream economists who gave Lehman Brothers a certificate of rude health just before its collapse, predicted tat by 2012 the Greek economy would start growing. The econom ...

“How can one speak of default in the future tense when we’re already bankrupt… Don’t you see the people scouring through garbage and sleeping on sidewalks? Those who led us to bankruptcy – the troika and the government – now claim they want to save us from bankruptcy. It’s incredible.” – Mikis Theodorakis, composer and songwriter “Everything is changing. Everything is frightening.” –Kathimerini, Greek newsp ...

Ian Traynor and Helena Smith in Athens The Guardian   MPs in Athens approve severe budget cuts imposed by the EU after rallies against the bill erupt in street violence. Greece enacted billions of euros in spending cuts and fresh austerity measures last night in a volatile parliamentary vote aimed at avoiding default on its national debt and keeping the eurozone intact, despite some of the worst riotin ...

By Ioana Patran and Sam Cage BUCHAREST (Reuters) - Romanian Prime Minister Emil Boc resigned on Monday, giving way to mass protests against IMF-backed austerity measures and joining leaders of other European Union states felled by soaring debts. President Traian Basescu named Boc's justice minister, Catalin Predoiu, to replace him at the head of a government whose popularity is languishing in opinion polls ...

US radicals came up a century ago with sound proposals for a maximum income, enforced through progressive taxation, to ensure that the rich couldn’t so easily buy political influence, as well as to adjust inequality. The Occupy Wall Street movement hasn’t yet demanded a cap on individual income but it probably will. Ever since the “golden age” after the Civil War, great American popular surges for economic ...

Last week the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, a British think tank, released a startling chart comparing the current slump with past recessions and recoveries. It turns out that by one important measure — changes in real G.D.P. since the recession began — Britain is doing worse this time than it did during the Great Depression. Four years into the Depression, British G.D.P. had regained ...

Development Minister Michalis Chrysochoidis, who has declared he intends to challenge for the PASOK leadership, said on Tuesday that when he was part of the Cabinet in 2010 he did not read the terms of Greece's loan agreement with the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. Speaking to Skai TV, Chrysochoidis said that he was too busy at the time with his duties as Citizens' Protection Minister t ...

Headlines the world over ‘agonise’, on behalf of Greece and Europe, on whether the PSI+ negotiations will come to a conclusion. The presumption is that, if they succeed, Greece will be reprieved and Europe (with France and the EFSF having recently been downgraded) will buy some much needed extra time to put, at long last, its house in order. Nonsense, I say! This PSI+ is yet another assault on Reason. It co ...

On the last day of 2011, a headline in The Wall Street Journal read: “Spain Misses Deficit Target, Sets Cuts.” The cruel forces of poor economic logic were at work to welcome in the new year. The European Union has become a vicious circle of burgeoning debt leading to radical austerity measures, which in turn further weaken economic conditions and result in calls for still more damaging cuts in government s ...