Author: Alexandre Abreu
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Epilogue: The Euro as Historical Hubris
The euro is many things at once. Like all other currencies, it is a means of payment, a unit of account and a store of value. Since its inception, it is an attempt to challenge the hegemony of the US dollar as world currency. Insofar as it embodies the transfer of monetary and exchange rate…
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2013: A Year in the Crisis
So here we are in 2014. As this edition of the Euro Crisis blog draws to a close, it is time to say farewell to the readers and greet the new contributors who will take over and comment on the Euro zone crisis as it develops from here on in. Farewells are also an appropriate…
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A Not-So-Surprising Accession
On January 1st, 2014, the day on which the euro had its 15th birthday, Latvia became the 18th member of the eurozone. This accession was prepared over many years and Lithuania is scheduled to follow in 2015, but still this will have come as a surprise to many. Given the predicaments to which eurozone members,…
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US Treasury versus Germany: New Controversies, Old Debates
You may have heard about the recent report by the US Treasury criticising Germany’s deflationary economic policies and their harmful effect on the global economy. And if so, you have probably also heard about the reaction that ensued on the part of the representatives of the German authorities, who retorted that there’s nothing wrong with…
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Pushing on a String: LTRO, Endogenous Money and the Eurozone Crisis
(slightly wonkish, as Paul Krugman would put it) At a press conference about a month ago, the President of the ECB, Mr Mario Draghi, raised the possibility of a new round of LTRO (Long Term Refinancing Operation), which, for those less familiar with the topic, consist of large-scale, long-term, low-interest loans to commercial banks across…
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The Eurozone Crisis: Finance 2 – Society 0
An interesting and crucial feature of the eurozone crisis, which hardly ever gets mentioned, is the extent to which it corresponds to a massive, lengthy, disguised and undemocratic process of socialisation of debt relations. What started out as a massive build-up of debt/credit relations between private debtors and private creditors has been gradually converted into…
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Much Ado about Nothing
As many readers will have heard or read through other media, the last few weeks have seen a political crisis emerge, develop and finally subside in Portugal. The plot has been a convoluted one, with much toing-and-froing and backtracking, as well as attempts to change the game altogether – but all it came down to…
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Reckless Spending and Excessive Wage Growth: Myths Debunked
If I were to pinpoint the two most harmful and most often repeated myths at the core of the orthodox account of the euro crisis, these would surely be, first, that the public debt crisis across the eurozone was solely or mostly caused by reckless government spending; and second, that the fundamental competitiveness problem of…
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Dangerous Fantasies and Really Existing ‘Adjustment’
It has been two years to the month since the original Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed between the ECB-EC-IMF Troika and the Portuguese Government. Elections followed shortly after, bringing into power a new conservative coalition government, which proceeded to implement the structural adjustment programme with unbridled enthusiasm. In the words of Prime Minister Passos…
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Halftime in Cyprus
Analysing the latest acute episode of the euro crisis, Cyprus, on March 26th is a bit like writing a match report at halftime: you’re bound to get much of the story right, but if you try to predict the final outcome, you may very well miss – by an inch or by a mile. And…