Greek talks appear to fail:New elections very likely;anti-austerity a growing movement

According to the latest reports from Greece the talks among the three leading party leaders and the Greek president have failed to reach an agreement essentially because Syriza is sticking to its position and refusing to agree to enforcing  extreme austerity in  return for bailout funds and following the structural adjustment style squeezing of the Greek economy. The President is now meeting with the leaders of the smaller parties to see if they can be added to the potential coalition of New Democracy and Pasok which would enforce the austerity in order to stay in the euro while trying to renegotiate better terms. But unless these parties change their positions that is unlikely. The polls continue to suggest that Syriza is gaining strength and now has enough support to finish first in the next round of elections followed by New Democracy. Pasok would slip further back if the polls are accurate. There is an interesting article by Owen Jones in the British paper The Independent on Sunday here that is worth reading for its insights into how the right wing laissez-faire school may have been overplaying their hand in the current crisis.The paper’s leader editorial here on the fate of the euro is also worth reading. For some of my previously published writing on deficits and debt and deficit hysteria in Canada see here and here.

Advertisement

About haroldchorneyeconomist

I am Professor of political economy at Concordia university in Montréal, Québec, Canada. I received my B.A.Hons (econ.&poli sci) from the University of Manitoba. I also completed my M.A. degree in economics there. Went on to spend two years at the London School of Economics as a Ph.D. student in economics and then completed my Ph.D. in political economy at the University of Toronto. Was named a John W.Dafoe fellow, a CMHC fellow and a Canada Council fellow. I also was named a Woodrow Wilson fellow in 1968 after completing my first class honours undergraduate degree. Worked as an economist in the area of education, labour economics and as the senior economist with the Manitoba Housing and Renewal Corporation for the Government of Manitoba from 1972 to 1978. I also have worked as an economic consultant for MDT socio-economic consultants and have been consulted on urban planning, health policy, linguistic duality and public sector finance questions by the governments of Manitoba, Saskatchewan,the cities of Regina and Saskatoon, Ontario and the Federal government of Canada. I have also been consulted by senior leaders of the British Labour party, MPs from the Progressive Conservative party, the Liberal party and the New Democrats on economic policy questions. Members of the Government of France under the Presidency of Francois Mitterand discussed my work on public sector deficits. I have also run for elected office at the municipal level. I first began to write about quantitative easing as a useful policy option during the early 1980s.
This entry was posted in austerity, deficit hysteria, deficits and debt, European debt crisis, European unemployment, Greek sovereign debt crisis, Mr.Papandreou and democracy, Uncategorized, unemployment and tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s