Euro

Tag: Portugal

  • 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…

  • Too Much Trust in EU Institutions

    The general impression is that the EMU zone (which gathers countries belonging to, or potentially belonging to, the euro) suffers from a crisis of trust. How can we move forward with European integration when people lack trust in EU institutions? The facts may however be quite different: there is too much trust in the EU…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • The European Periphery: Between a Rock and a Hard Place

    The strategy of the Portuguese government in the context of the current crisis, which is essentially aligned with the prescriptions of the ECB-EC-IMF troika, revolves around two axes that, indeed, were also typical of the policy packages implemented in the global south from the 1980s onwards: stabilisation, which in this case refers to slashing public…

  • Euro crisis: a View from Lisbon

    In my first contribution to this blog, I would like to start with outlining what I’ll set out to do in the coming months. The readers of this blog will be quite familiar with the ‘orthodox’ account of the current crisis in the eurozone: profligate public spending by governments in the European periphery, which need…