A displaced person is one who has been driven from one’s homeland or place of residence by war, internal upheaval, or natural disaster. There are more displaced persons in the world right now than there have been since the end of World War II, and there were somewhere between 10 and 20 million of them …
Paul Krugman and others have asserted that European banks were the big beneficiaries of the early Greek bailout. They’ve gotten pushback, apparently. Steve Randy Waldman has created a timeline of events from that early 2010 bailout through the second one in 2012. I can’t swear to the accuracy of his analysis, but it seems to …
I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that the Troika of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF really want to force Greece’s government out of office. Paul Krugman seemingly thinks along the same lines: he notes that the troika has issued yet another ultimatum to Greece and its Prime Minister, and …
The European Union’s Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the European Commission seem to be hell-bent on forcing Greece’s new ruling government to agree to even more pension cuts (they’ve already been cut by about 30-50 percent in the past five years) and raising value-added taxes in order to get more cash to pay …
Are we about to become, not Greece as the Republicans would have it, but Venice, specifically Venice as it was in the 14th century? America’s Serrata also takes a more explicit form: the tilting of the economic rules in favor of those at the top. The crony capitalism of today’s oligarchs is far subtler than …
The Europeans who advocated major austerity for Greece to solve its budget problems are now watching as the country slides into depression. They seem to have believed that punishing Greek politicians for their profligate ways was more important than keeping the country as a going concern. European powers, led by fiscally conservative Germany, have been …
I am hardly qualified to provide a solution to the problems Greece and Europe are having, but I do think that George Papandreou is getting a bad rap for calling for a referendum of his citizens on the latest bailout plan offered to his country by the other members of the Eurozone. As I understand …
The Europeans (and the press) really do like to obfuscate. As Atrios says, “I guess we’ll continue to maintain this fantasy of ‘bailing out Greece’ instead of ‘bailing out people who lent money to Greece.’” Greece is in trouble because it borrowed more money than it could pay back. From whom did it borrow money? …