Jamie Galbraith on the euro crisis

Jamie Galbraith's piece on the euro crisis reminds me why he's my favorite living economist: The crisis in the Eurozone 11/10/2011. He also organized a conference last week at the University of Texas on the crisis; the papers can be found here: Financial Crisis in the Eurozone.

This is a sample, but read Galbraith's whole column:

The Eurozone crisis is a bank crisis posing as a series of national debt crises and complicated by reactionary economic ideas, a defective financial architecture and a toxic political environment, especially in Germany, in France, in Italy and in Greece. ...

Europe’s political classes exist these days in a vise forged by desperate bankers and angry voters, no less in Germany and France than in Greece or Italy. Discourse is sealed off from fresh ideas and political survival depends on kicking cans dow[n] roads so that the fact that this is a banking crisis does not have to be faced. The fate of the weak is at best incidental. Thus every meeting of finance ministers and prime ministers yields treacherous half-measures and legal evasions.

Tags: euro, james galbraith