Thanks for visiting this blog, created in July 2012 out of great concern for the fate of the €uro currency area, once again on the verge of collapse due to the economically ill-advised and heartless austerity policies imposed on Greece, Spain and other heavily-indebted €uro area countries by a christian democratic German chancellor impressed with the budgeting skills of Schwabian housewives. Meant to reduce the public debt and put the countries back on a path to economic growth, these macro-economically idiotic policies are doing anything but cause "pointless misery" as Paul Krugman so aptly describes it (Bloomberg, July 23-29, 2012).

Instead of reducing public debt, the austerity measures set in motion a vicious cycle of economic contraction, rising unemployment and poverty, lower tax revenues, private capital flight, and rising public debt shares as the economy declines faster than the public debt. What’s more, the austerity-driven ‘blood, sweat and tears’ policies recommended to the European periphery derive from the same economic doctrine that brought us to the brink of disaster in 2008. These policies are not only misanthropic and counterproductive to economic growth and debt reduction in Europe, but will prove explosive for the €uro currency area unless a drastic change of course takes place - and soon.

While I do not pretend to have ‘the’ solution for the €uro crisis, I would like to offer alternative economic perspectives and views on current events, and hope to chart a more humane path toward a balanced, socially fair, and sustainable economic future for the €uro area.

On the origins of the 2008 Great Financial Crisis:
“90+% of traders are men, and they bet all of our bank deposits on liar loans which froze credit leading to 40% average losses passed on to ordinary taxpayers; then begged for trillion-dollar bailouts upon which they paid themselves 50% higher boni.”


Wednesday, December 3, 2014

My recently published e-book and Pope Francis' speech at the European Parliament in Strasbourg

Dear readers,

 I am happy to inform you of the recent publication of my e-book "From Washington Consensus to Economic Shock Therapy in Europe," available for purchase at Amazon.com. If you wish, you can take a look inside, read the contents page, the introduction, and the first part of chapter I here.

 As if to underline the key messages of my book, Pope Francis gave a wonderful, eloquent, heartrending, and inspiring speech on Europe, adressed to the members of the European Parliament. Allow me to cite a few key sentences of this speech, sentences I found particularly poignant:   

"At the heart of this ambitious [European] project was confidence in man. Not so much man as citizen or as economic agent, but in man, in men and women, as persons endowed with transcendent dignity".....

 ...."To our dismay, we see technical and economic questions dominating political debate, to the detriment of any genuine concern for human beings. The human being risks being reduced to a mere cog in a machine that treats them as items of consumption to be exploited with the result that, as is so tragically apparent, whenever a human life no longer proves useful to the machine, it is discarded with few qualms as in the case of the terminally ill, the old or abandoned and uncared for, and the children who are killed before they are born".....

....."A Europe which is no longer open to the transcendent dimension of life is a Europe which risks slowly losing its own soul and that humanistic spirit which it yet loves and defends"......

 ....."The motto of the European Union is "united in diversity". But unity doesn't mean uniformity of political, economic, and cultural life, or of ways of thinking. In point of fact, all real unity draws from the rich diversities that make it up"....."It's no secret that a conception of unity seen as uniformity strikes at the vitality of the democratic system, weakening the rich, fruitful, and constructive interplay of organizations and political parties. This leads to the risk of living in a world of ideas, of mere words, of images, of sophistry, and to end up confusing the reality of democracy with a new political nominalism"....

 ...."Keeping democracy alive in Europe requires that we avoid the many globalizing trends that dilute reality"...."The true strength of our democracies, understood as expressions of the political will of the people, must not be allowed to collapse under the pressure of multinational interests which are not universal, which weaken them and turn them into uniform systems of economic power at the service of unseen empires".... 

 ...."I encourage you to work so that Europe rediscovers the best of itself"...."Europe urgently needs to recover its true features in order to grow, as its founders intended, in peace and harmony".....

 ....."Dear members of the European Parliament, the time has come to work together to build a Europe, a Europe which revolves not around the economy but around the sacred nature of the human person and around inalienable values"......"A Europe which looks to the heavens and pursues ideals; a Europe which cares for, which defends and which protects every man and woman; a Europe which moves on safe ground, a precious point of reference for all humanity."     

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