In recommendations to German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the end of July, the German Council of Economic Experts
outlined how a weak member country could leave the Eurozone and called for strengthening the European monetary union.
This month’s World Economic Outlook
released by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) only confirms that consequences of the collapse of the financial system, which started six years ago, are serious. And they are accentuated by the aging of the population, not only in Europe but also in Asia, the slowing of productivity and weak private investment.
At last, on Tuesday Feb. 24, the Eurogroup (of eurozone finance ministers) approved the Greek government’s commitment to a programme of reforms in return for extending the country’s bailout deal.
A recent report by the
Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion at the London School of Economics called attention to the fact that, at the present rate of inequality, by the year 2025, the United Kingdom will have returned to the unequal society of the end of the 19th century. In other words, we are going back to the times of Queen Victoria!
The economic crisis began in the United States under the administration of then-President George W. Bush, following the collapse of the Lehman Brothers Bank. It came as a result of unregulated globalisation and a neoliberal ideology that places usurious markets, offshore bank accounts, and money for the sake of money, above state power. It is an ideology that ignores citizens, even as they starve.
The problem of the U.S. economy lies much deeper than
the fiscal cliff. Wise people--Robert Borosage, Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz--see neither the fiscal deficit nor the U.S. debt as the key problems, but the lack of growth.