NEW YORK TIMES: …Nowhere have austerity policies been more aggressively tried — and generally failed to live up to results promised by advocates — than inGreece.
After more than four years of belt tightening, patience is wearing thin, and tentative signs of improvement have not yet trickled down into the lives of average Greeks…
In 2010, with Greece crippled by debt and threatening the survival of the euro, the European Union, the International Monetary Fund and theEuropean Central Bank began imposing German-inspired austerity on the country. The aim was to slash the budget deficit and address fundamental problems like corruption and a failure to collect taxes. Such policies, they promised, would get Greece back on its feet, able to borrow again on financial markets…. (more)
EDITOR: Greece needed to conduct reforms but not to practice austerity. Once again…and again… and again we see how austerity thwarts recovery. Fiscal stimulus hurries it along.
