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By Mark Twain
By Ogi Ogas (Author), Sai Gaddam (Author)
$18
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 Shutterstock photo of EU roundtable.
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By William Pfaff — It is not simply the euro zone that is threatened by the dramatic economic discrepancies that now exist among its members. Now it is the European Union itself that is in danger.
Posted on May 14, 2013
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 AP/Alexander Zemlianichenko
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By Ivo Mijnssen — The collapse of the Cypriot banking system reveals much about the complex relationship among ordinary Russians, “offshore oligarchs” and a political system that depends on both.
Posted on May 14, 2013
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 mcdett (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
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A gloomy forecast for the sales of a German automaker portends the possible spread of Southern Europe’s economic crisis to other parts of the continent—and the world.
Posted on Apr 26, 2013
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 west.m (CC BY 2.0)
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“It seems unlikely,” anthropologist and author David Graeber writes. “After all, as I and many others have long argued, austerity was never really an economic policy: ultimately, it was always about morality.”
Posted on Apr 22, 2013
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 Shutterstock photo of the euro.
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By William Pfaff — A new “Alternative for Germany” political movement has erupted as a backlash against the euro, and against Germany’s fellow members of the EU.
Posted on Apr 17, 2013
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 David Blackwell. (CC BY 2.0)
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More than 100,000 unemployed professionals have left Greece amid a shrinking economy and a lack of jobs to seek better opportunities abroad in a trend that will dramatically impact the country for generations.
Posted on Apr 11, 2013
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 vicmontol (CC BY 2.0)
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One country refused to bail out its derelict banks and slash social spending amid the financial crisis. And guess what? Unlike the eurozone and the United States, it’s making a sturdy comeback.
Posted on Dec 1, 2012
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 Ondrej Kloucek (CC BY-SA 2.0)
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Recession has returned to the eurozone for the second time since the financial crisis began in 2008. The region’s GDP fell by 0.1 percent in 2012’s third quarter, which followed a 0.2 percent contraction in the previous three months.
Posted on Nov 15, 2012
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 chrispyworld (CC BY-ND 2.0)
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Unemployment in the eurozone has climbed to nearly 18.5 million people across 17 countries, with 146,000 people joining the ranks of the jobless just last month, The Guardian reports.
Posted on Oct 31, 2012
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Luojie, Cagle Cartoons, China Daily, China —
Posted on Oct 22, 2012
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 jmayrault (CC BY 2.0)
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On the eve of a eurozone summit that will consider a unified continental budget, French President Francois Hollande said that his half of the Paris-Berlin crisis team will insist on an easing of German leader Angela Merkel’s hard push for “austerity and the surrender of national powers to tighten fiscal discipline,” The Guardian reports.
Posted on Oct 17, 2012
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 AP/Nikolas Giakoumidis
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Up to 200,000 Greeks took to the streets Wednesday during a general strike that paralyzed the country, marking the public’s first major confrontation with Athens’ 3-month-old coalition government.
Posted on Sep 26, 2012
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 HaPe_Gera (CC BY 2.0)
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Germany’s Constitutional Court permitted Chancellor Angela Merkel to use German funds to buoy the economies of eurozone countries that have struggled in the continent’s nagging debt crisis.
Posted on Sep 12, 2012
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 SnowViolent (CC BY 2.0)
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A leaked letter from Greece’s lenders—the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund—orders the country to introduce a six-day workweek as part of a package of austerity demands for a second bailout.
Posted on Sep 5, 2012
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 Photo by TaxFix.co.uk (CC-BY)
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By William Pfaff — Most of the damage to the European economy was done by innocent submission of credulous policymakers to the conventional wisdom of the international marketplace.
Posted on Sep 4, 2012
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 DonkeyHotey (CC BY 2.0)
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The eurozone is headed for another recession as its economic output shrinks again in 2012’s third quarter, economists say.
Posted on Aug 23, 2012
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By William Pfaff — The European Union is at risk of being destroyed by the euro. The credit crisis founded upon the swindle by Wall Street that was retailed to Europe’s banks has created divisions in Europe which are undermining what was supposed to be mutual confidence and solidarity among the 17 members of the euro zone.
Posted on Jul 17, 2012
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 NASA GSFC/Jacques Descloitres and Ana Pinheiro
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By Amy Goodman — As Spain’s prime minister announced deep austerity cuts Wednesday in order to secure funds from the European Union to bail out Spain’s failing banks, the people of Spain have taken to the streets once again for what they call “Real Democracy Now.”
Posted on Jul 11, 2012
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 Photo by motiqua (CC-BY)
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By William Pfaff — Nearly every step in the federalist direction has produced unnecessary complication and strain in the EU. Portugal is not Iowa. Italy cannot become California.
Posted on Jul 11, 2012
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 Skley (CC BY-ND 2.0)
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The leaders of France, Germany, Spain and Italy made a bid to save the euro Friday, pledging to push for a $163 billion program to stimulate growth in the depressed European economies.
Posted on Jun 22, 2012
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Martin Sutovec, Cagle Cartoons, Slovakia —
Posted on Jun 16, 2012
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 nikoretro (CC BY-SA 2.0)
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Amid a festering economic crisis, Greek society’s super-rich have retreated to their private mansions and island resorts to sip cocktails, kick back on imported Asian sand and figure out new ways to slip their money out of the country.
Posted on Jun 14, 2012
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 Images_of_Money (CC BY-SA 2.0)
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European leaders are drawing up a solution to the EU’s fiscal crisis that would hand sovereignty over the budgets and fiscal policies of eurozone states to Germany in return for the pooling of national debt and banking liabilities. Brussels, France, Spain and Germany all support a federalized eurozone.
Posted on Jun 5, 2012
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 Gabriela Camerotti (CC-BY)
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Tally the fatal, unhappy costs of runaway capitalism. Across Europe, businessmen unable to cope with the world made by the 2008 economic crash are taking their lives.
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 Wikimedia Commons
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Remember when austerity sounded more like an obscure SAT word than cause for international economic panic? This time around, it’s the Spaniards who are feeling the pinch, as their government has announced major budget cuts for the year.
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 cobalt123 (CC-BY)
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A 0.2 percent dip in GDP at the end of 2011, which followed a drastic decline in the third quarter, has thrown Ireland back into recession, alongside Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Portugal and Greece, and begs the question of whether austerity is the answer to Europe’s economic woes.
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 AP / Michael Probst
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Having pulled off the biggest debt restructuring deal ever, Greece is on track for yet another bailout. Meanwhile, the Greek government is also preparing to make yet another round of austerity cuts, which may involve lowering the nation’s minimum wage.
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 AP / Kostas Tsironis
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On Sunday, after months of economic and political turmoil, Greek citizens fed up with paying for mistakes made by their country’s power elite took to the streets by the tens of thousands to signal their disapproval of the austerity measures the government pushed through late that night.
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 AP / Michael Probst
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Once again, European leaders convened for a eurozone pep rally on Tuesday, meeting up in Brussels to see if their economic resuscitation efforts in recent months are paying off and if Greece will stop hogging all the attention anytime soon.
Posted on Jan 31, 2012
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 AP / Margarethe Wichert / dapd
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By Nomi Prins — The markets weren’t shocked by last week’s wave of pre-broadcast S&P sovereign debt downgrades. For months, the question wasn’t “if” but “when.” And true to form, just as with the U.S. downgrade, S&P’s reasoning skated the surface of prevailing wisdom.
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 reuters.com
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Now that the holiday season is over, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel are back in crisis management mode, huddling in Berlin on Monday before emerging to hold a joint news conference on the future of the eurozone.
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 Wikimedia Commons
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If only we could import a little bit of Germany right now—in a good way. Unlike many of its European neighbors, Germany is enjoying a bit of an economic boost in that its unemployment rate dropped to a record low for the month of December.
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 AP / Geert Vanden Wijngaert
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At the close of an economic summit that appears to have failed to rescue Italy, Spain and more of Europe from sinking deeper into a mire of recession, Guardian economics editor Larry Elliott prefigures the collapse of the euro as a unifying currency of the European Union. (more)
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This week, at a Brussels economic summit described as “make or break,” European leaders came together but drew the line at uniting. Meanwhile, back on this side of the Atlantic, conservatives mull Newt Gingrich’s presidential prospects and President Obama speechifies.
Posted on Dec 9, 2011
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 Flickr / DFID - UK Department for International Development (CC-BY)
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If pushing away from the European Union was British Prime Minister David Cameron’s goal in making the U.K. the only nation in the region to veto a proposal to renegotiate the EU treaty, he got what he wanted Friday.
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 bbc.co.uk
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As France and Germany have become the self-appointed leaders of the eurozone’s financial crisis recovery initiative, President Nicolas Sarkozy brought German Chancellor Angela Merkel in for a meeting in Paris, during which they decided, as Sarkozy said, “What has happened must never happen again.”
Posted on Dec 5, 2011
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 AP / Alex Brandon
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November’s dip in the official unemployment rate is nothing to clap about. Scrutiny of the details reveals that the new figure of 8.6 percent is due mostly to 315,000 Americans dropping out of the search for work, and most of the newly created positions were low-paying ones. That includes temporary jobs created to support the spike in commerce that comes with the holiday season. (more)
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 AP / Michael Probst
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In a speech Thursday, French President Nicolas Sarkozy confronted the economic quagmire otherwise known as the eurozone and declared that France and Germany would be the key players in Europe’s rehabilitation. Also important in Sarkozy’s scheme was the idea that stricter regulations would help ward off further catastrophe.
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 AP / Daniel Roland
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This week’s European crisis summit in Brussels has produced an agreement in an effort to mitigate what was looking like an inevitable economic catastrophe, judging by the dire situation in Greece and elsewhere in the eurozone. By Thursday, international markets were registering the results.
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 bbc.co.uk
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Greece is hanging by a thread, and its European neighbors scrambled to avoid a similar fate, and stave off even harder times for the Greeks, by holding a summit in Brussels on Wednesday. Here’s a look at a couple of action items on the busy agenda for German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French Prime Minister Francois Fillon … (more)
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Paresh Nath, Cagle Cartoons, The Khaleej Times, UAE —
Posted on Aug 15, 2011
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By William Pfaff — Athens in recent days has experienced continuing popular protest, sporadically violent, against the economic austerity program demanded of Greece by the IMF.
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 AP / Thanassis Stavrakis
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Three years into the Great Recession, the outlook is wobbly in the eurozone, according to the IMF. France and Germany are doing well enough to offset some of the economic problems plaguing their neighbors, but in a networked world, nations’ fates are intertwined.
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 Wikimedia Commons
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A group of Greek leaders fell short of reaching an agreement on Prime Minister George Papandreou’s austerity plan by week’s end, putting Greece on shaky ground in terms of the country’s chances of receiving more bailout funds from the IMF.
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 AP / Daniel Roland
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European Union financial officials meeting in Brussels have agreed on the setting up of a permanent bailout fund, even as Portugal reportedly teeters on the precipice of financial collapse.
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 AP / Daniel Roland
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Despite sounding more like an arcade than a currency oversight organization, European Union leaders have agreed to set up an official bailout fund for eurozone members as soon as 2013, doing “whatever is required” to defend the beleaguered currency.
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The Irish economy is in quite a state, and according to Labor TD (that’s MP in Irish parlance) Pat Rabbitte, some specific people are to blame for Ireland’s plight. One of them just happened to be right next to him ... (continued)
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By William Pfaff — The European Union’s leaders, Germany and France, decided Oct. 30 to try to change the EU’s Lisbon Treaty. This is a highly charged and divisive move.
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 AP / Daniel Roland
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Like a well-financed and politically powerful parent, the European Union has agreed to implement tougher rules for euro zone countries that overspend and over-borrow to “deter bad budgetary behavior” that could lead the currency into yet another crisis.
Posted on Oct 29, 2010
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