Commentary from Bill Mitchell, reviewing the sorry tale of how the euro currency was created, and recalling things said about the IMF, one of the contributors to our current mess.
"The IMF is like so many bureaucracies; it has repeatedly sought to extend what it does, beyond the objectives originally assigned to it. As IMF’s mission creep brought it outside its core area of competency in macroeconomics, into structural issues such as privatisation, labour markets, pension reforms and so forth …" Joseph Stiglitz
As summarized in posterity, these issues were clearly visible in a fogged-up
mirror, from the start.
'The irony or should we say the exemplification of what went wrong in European policy making circles was revealed in the opening paragraphs of the Lisbon conclusions.
We read, on the one hand, that the “Union is experiencing its best macro-economic outlook for a generation … [as a result] … of stability-oriented monetary policy supported by sound fiscal policies”.
On the other hand, it is stated that these “strengths should not distract our attention from a number of weaknesses. More than 15 million Europeans are still out of work” and the “employment rate is too low”.
An amazing disconnect that only those blinded by the neo-liberal ideology could make!' Bill Mitchell
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