Eurozone

By Dimitris Konstantakopoulos During a debate in the Committee on Employment of the European Parliament, a Greek Eurodeputy asked the President of the Eurogroup (the...

1/9/2017 French President Emmanuel Macron’s push for an ambitious overhaul of Europe’s single currency bloc is running up against robust resistance in Berlin despite conciliatory...

  This collective text initiated by Eric Toussaint, of the CADTM campaign for the abolition of the debt of the global South has been collectively...

* Τhis article was published by the Cyprus News Agency and it was translated into English by Wayne Hall US President Donald J. Trump February 6,...

European leaders have devoted scant attention to the future of the eurozone since July 2012, when Mario Draghi, the European Central Bank’s president, famously committed to do “whatever it takes” to save the common currency. For more than four years, they have essentially subcontracted the eurozone’s stability and integrity to the central bankers. But, while the ECB has performed the job skillfully, this quiet, convenient arrangement is coming to an end, because no central bank can solve political or constitutional conundrums.

Through the prism of the trade balance, the current account surplus can be viewed as a symptom of Germany’s economic success. German exports increased from 30% of GDP in 2000 to 47% in 2015. But with imports at merely 39% of GDP, this implies that Germany is providing capital to the rest of the world at a very high rate. Indeed, German savings have

It is important both because of its content as well as for the symbolic meaning it has assumed. The strokes of the counter reform against the constitution fall very hard. The newly conceived Senate (Upper House), for instance, retains important powers (such as on constitutional questions, in the relations with the EU, about local authorities, the election of the president, etc.), but should no longer be elected. The Senate was thus not abolished, as

Nearly 30% of the Spanish population is currently classified by the Unión General de Trabajadores (General Union of Workers, or UGT) as “at risk” of poverty. Any may consider joining the estimated 700,000 Spaniards who have fled the country to find marginal employment elsewhere. Most will opt to stay, however, knowing full well that that they are

Galbraith’s articles and interviews collected in this book (ending in October 2015) traces his growing exasperation at the “troika” – the European Central Bank (ECB), IMF and EU bureaucracy – which refused to loosen their demand that Greece impoverish its economy to a degree worse than the Great Depression. The fight against Greece was, in a nutshell, a rejection of parliamentary democracy after the incoming Syriza coalition of left-wing parties won election in January 2015 on a platform of resisting austerity and privatization.

Over the last few months the debate over Brexit has begun to change shape, and with it, a slow reshuffling of political alignments has taken place. Concerned about the crude xenophobic and nativist policies that were floated at the Tory party conference in September, both liberal Leavers and Remainers have been