Many fear that a Greek default would lead voters elsewhere in Europe to favour default over austerity. In contrast, this column argues that it is more likely to have the opposite effect
Read more...Central banks think they’re omnipotent – until they aren’t.
Read more...The noose continues to tighten on Greece.
Read more...Hudson’s so-called “Operation Vulture,” the strip-mining of what little is left of a functioning economy in Ukraine, comes straight out of the neoliberal playbook.
Read more...As reader Li, an international road warrior, says, “America is getting to be just like Italy, except without the attractive men.”
Read more...Yves here. I’m quite interested in reader reactions to this scheme. My big reservation is that the amount of the scrip devised by the authors, the TCC, has to be limited to the an amount of discount of future tax payments that is deemed to be credible. Given that Bill Mitchell has estimated that Greece […]
Read more...A review of the pros and cons of various parallel currency options for Greece.
Read more...Mario Draghi is more and more visibly meddling in politics, yet another reminder that central bank “independence” is a fig leaf.
Read more...While virtually no one expects a Brexit, history suggests would be naive to expect the upcoming negotiations between the UK and EU to be a cakewalk.
Read more...An overview of the history of the economic dispute between the IMF and the Eurozone creditors over Greece, and what that means for the ongoing negotiations.
Read more...How Merkel was sidelined in negotiations over Ukraine.
Read more...More fog of reporting….did the European Commission lodge a proposal to break the Greek negotiating logjam? If so, it’s backpedaling at high speed.
Read more...A flurry of stories this weekend confirms that Greece and its creditors remain hopelessly at odds. The inertial path is to a Greek default
Read more...Figures confirm the pattern already observed last month, with a marked improvement in the primary balance achieved mostly via expenditure cuts and a more limited improvement in revenues.
Read more...Anatole Kaletsky has a cognent, forcefully argued new article at the Project Syndicate website, Why Syriza Will Blink, which independently comes to the conclusion we’ve reached, that the winning strategy for the creditors is to keep Greece in the sweatbox and use worsening economic and social conditions in Greece to crush domestic support for Syriza. Kaletsky goes further than we have, arguing that this is the course the Troika is taking, and the new coalition should have anticipated this as a likely strategy, since it’s the same one they used successfully against Cyprus two years ago.
Read more...