After Chris and John’s posts, a lot of which I agree with, I thought it made sense to look at the third member in the three-cornered disaster in Euroland …

When you look at this series, two things strike the eye. One, good God what a long and deep recession. And two, it was coming to an end. Even the worst policy mistakes don’t last forever and a combination of time, human resilience and the Pigou Effect will usually prevail. Greece had two quarters of consecutive growth at the beginning of 2014. Unemployment also began to fall. They were issuing bonds on the open market and had some hopes of completing the second bailout program with a degree of success.

Then, Syriza happened.
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Chris has already pointed out the failure of the core European institutions in their response to the global financial crisis. One excuse that can be made for these institutions is that they are still in the process of development, and were ill-prepared, intellectually and institutionally, for an event so far outside their experience. The ECB and EC developed in a period when controlling inflation and stabilizing government debt were the key imperatives, and they responded to the crisis accordingly.

No such excuse can be made for the third member of the Troika, the International Monetary Fund. The IMF has understood from the start that the austerity policies it has imposed are economically unsound and a repetition of past failures. And yet it has been unwilling and unable to do anything else.

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