European Debt Crisis

Debt and personal indebtedness have become a global problem as consumption-driven economies have spread across the world. These days, outstanding consumer debt is a normal feature of many economies and for a large number of people, the source of great mental distress. However, an understanding of personal debt requires an understanding of the complex social systems that produce poverty. This book frames credit use as a social phenomenon, and explores the dynamic interplays between consumers who need credit and credit granting institutions. By drawing upon a range of international perspectives, this book sheds much needed light on the social and psychological factors that contribute to the growth of personal debt and its associated impact on wellbeing. In so doing, the book contributes to an understanding of why more and more people are in debt, why it is causing so much harm to so many people and exactly who is benefiting from what has become the world's number one growth industry.
Edited by Serdar M. Degirmencioglu & Carl Walker.
Hardcover 9781137407788. forthcoming in June 2015.

 La narrazione standard della crisi fase 1: 2007-2009. Finanza colpevole: una spiegazione convincente?  La narrazione standard della crisi fase 2: 2010-2014. Debito pubblico eccessivo: una spiegazione convincente?  Alla ricerca di una spiegazione alternativa: la crisi come effetto di una evoluzione strutturale  Le leve della crescita nei paesi a capitalismo maturo dagli anni 1980: finanza e debito  Il ruolo dell'euro nella crisi europea  Il ruolo della Germania

La visión oficial afirma, básicamente, que la crisis de deuda europea se asocia a la irresponsabilidad fiscal de los países periféricos (PP) –España, Irlanda, Portugal y Grecia. De aquí se desprende que el modo de afrontar la crisis consiste en realizar un ajuste del gasto público que permita a estos países hacer frente a sus deudas, para así recuperar la confianza de los mercados financieros. En contraposición a esta lectura de la crisis, se presenta una visión alternativa, que aquí se denomina estructural. Esta última identifica como aspecto central de dicha crisis a
los impedimentos inherentes a la Unión Monetaria, que consisten en no permitir lidiar con las diferencias estructurales que existen entre los distintos países miembros. Más precisamente, a partir de la adopción de la moneda única, los PP renunciaron al manejo autónomo de la política monetaria y cambiaria. La imposibilidad de contar con estas herramientas de política económica se asocia con los desbalances de cuenta corriente y flujos de capital evidenciados entre los países miembros, que terminaron desencadenando la crisis de deuda actual, conforme esta segunda interpretación de los hechos.

This article shows how a specific set of Italian economic ideas, which
were first formulated in the first half of the twentieth century and later espoused by a network of economists from Bocconi University, Milan, came to play an important role in shaping European policy responses to the Great Recession and establishing the doctrine of ‘expansionary austerity.’ It argues that two factors – the formalization of these ideas in the language of mainstream economics and the establishment of professional networks that operated across a host of linked ecologies – contributed to their influence. The result was a ‘boomerang effect’, or a transfer of economic
ideas from the European periphery to centers of policy-making power and back again. This phenomenon is understudied in the existing political economy literature, which tends to assume that ideational traffic is one-way, with ideas originating in centers of power and traveling from there to the periphery.

In this interview, which I translated with Tom Vandeputte, the Italian philosopher and sociologist Maurizio Lazzarato elaborates and extends some of the arguments developed in his book "The Making on Indebted Man".

The interview was conducted by Antonio Alia, Vincenzo Boccanfuso and Loris Narda. The original Italian version has been published via UniNomade in May 2012 under the title ‘Sovvertire la macchina del debito infinito’.

Squilibrio Il labirinto della crescita e dello sviluppo capitalistico prefazione di Paolo Leon Le ragioni dello squilibrio sono essenzialmente nell'incapacità delle imprese e delle famiglie di conoscere gli effetti macroeco-nomici delle loro azioni. Naturalmente, sono le decisioni di im-presa che muovono l'economia, ma non è chiaro come tali decisioni siano prese, e quanto influenzino e siano influenzate dall'andamento dell'economia nel suo complesso. Così, se è indubbio che l'economia è trainata dalle decisioni impren-ditoriali, tuttavia sono gli effetti non conosciuti di queste decisioni che alterano continuamente la struttura. Una delle ragioni dell'intervento pubblico sta proprio nell'ignoranza dei decisori. Molto rilievo, in questo libro, è dato al progresso tecnico, specialmente nella sua forma di nuove tecniche «superiori»-ovvero quelle che costa-no di meno e producono di più rispetto a quelle esistenti, quali che sia-no i rapporti tra i prezzi dei fattori della produzione [...]. Un avanza-mento introdotto nel libro è nella qualificazione del progresso tecnico come elemento della domanda effettiva, proprio per gli effetti macroe-conomici dell'applicazione delle nuove tecniche. Nello squilibrio, tutta-via, gli imprenditori non sanno se le tecniche scelte siano effettivamente superiori per l'economia nel suo complesso, e così si possono facilmente presentare grandi fallimenti, distorsioni nei prezzi e nei costi, sprechi ge-neralizzati, situazioni che giustificano l'intervento pubblico. Gli autori guardano al progresso tecnico anche per illustrare la poca fondatezza delle politiche europee, che apparentemente incoraggiano l'innovazione, ma chiudono nella prigione del «consolidamento fisca-le» l'unico soggetto, lo Stato, capace di mettere in moto l'innovazione.

Il processo di costruzione di una politica estera dell'Unione Europea (UE), distinta da quella dei suoi paesi membri, è stato lungo e faticoso e, come dimostra l'impotenza dell'UE di fronte alle crisi recenti -in Ucraina piuttosto che in Libia o in Siria -è ancora lungi dalla sua conclusione. I suoi principi, i suoi valori, i suoi strumenti, i suoi punti di forza e di debolezza sono il risultato dell'interazione tra gli interessi nazionali degli Stati membri nel quadro dei vincoli posti dal sistema internazionale. Come illustrato in seguito, le diverse fasi del mutare del sistema internazionale hanno posto dei vincoli allo sviluppo di una politica estera comune, ma hanno offerto anche opportunità (Bretherton and Vogler 2006, 24-27). La fase attuale, segnata da una crisi economica internazionale da cui l'Europa fatica a riprendersi e da un disordine globale contraddistinto da sistemi di governance inefficaci e inadatti a gestire le dinamiche derivate dalla globalizzazione, non fa eccezione.

The year 2002 would be remembered in the European Union as the year the ‘Euro’ officially became the common legal tender of the ‘Eurozone’ comprising presently of 19 member states. Exactly seven years after, a full blown banking and sovereign debt crisis was evident in the monetary union which raised fresh financial concerns the world over after that of the 2007-2008 global financial crisis. The Eurozone debt crisis that caught the international community by surprise, began with the shocking revelation on the humongous external debt hovering over Greece. Afterwards, the ballooning debt-to-GDP ratio of other peripheral states in the Euro Area - Italy, Ireland, Portugal and Spain surfaced thus giving rise to the acronym G.I.I.P.S in reference to the five indebted countries in the Eurozone. This paper therefore examines the sovereign debt crisis of E.U member states belonging to the Eurozone and the effect it has had on their economic growth. With Greece as the case study, the nature, causes and rescue packages so far adopted at salvaging the Eurozone debt crisis since 2009 till date were duly accounted for via an historical and empirical approach which was heavily dependent on secondary sources of quantitative data.

Introductory chapter of PhD thesis: 'Why Not Default? The Structural Power of Finance in Sovereign Debt Crises.' Defended (without corrections) at the European University Institute in Florence on May 19, 2016.

This thesis aims to answer a simple question with far-reaching implications: why do heavily indebted peripheral states not default on their external debts more often? Building on case studies of sovereign debt crises in Mexico (1982-’89), Argentina (1999-’05) and Greece (2010-’15), the findings of this research demonstrate that the traditional explanations of debtor compliance proposed in the economics literature — centering on reputation, sanctions and democratic institutions — hold limited explanatory power.

Instead, the thesis spells out a political economy approach to sovereign debt that recognizes the importance of social conflicts and power struggles over the distribution of adjustment costs. In these conflicts, it is argued that finance possesses a unique advantage over indebted states: through their capacity to withhold the short-term credit lines on which the latter depend for their reproduction, lenders can inflict debilitating spillover costs that greatly limit the debtor’s room for maneuver. This structural power of finance has increased markedly as a result of globalization and financialization, and the main objective of this project is to identify the exact mechanisms through which it operates and the conditions under which it is effective and under which it breaks down.

The findings highlight the importance of debt concentration in the lending structure (which eases the formation of creditors’ cartels, strengthening market discipline); the exposure of big banks and institutional lenders in core countries (which compels creditor states and international financial institutions to intervene as lenders of last resort and provide emergency loans under strict policy conditionality); and the bridging role fulfilled by bankers and elites inside the borrowing country (which endows them with a privileged position in financial policymaking and internalizes fiscal discipline into the debtors’ state apparatus). The thesis concludes by spelling out the implications of these findings for the quality of democracy and the study of political economy more generally.

El ordenamiento jurídico comunitario, tanto desde una perspectiva general como desde la perspectiva singular que aportan las respectivas legislaciones de los Estados miembros, presenta cierto déficit regulatorio desde la perspectiva de la mejor tutela de familias y consumidores endeudados en exceso. Esta insuficiencia, tanto por sí misma como en combinación con otras disfunciones, sigue infuyendo en el colapso economico-financiero de una Europa condicionada por una excepcional coyuntura económica cuyas dimensiones aún no son exactamente apreciables.

This chapter provides a reading and a contextualization of three recent performative public artworks to map the way unpayable debts manifest across politics, economics, culture and society under the global order of financialized capitalism today. By unpayable debts here I have in mind both, on the one hand, the proliferation of financial debts that cannot be repaid and, on the other, the subterranean collective moral or political debts that, though they cannot be quantified, are no less real or important for that. Starting with a brief consideration of the power and materiality of the imagination as a key dimension of capitalism’s financialization, I then turn to a reading of UK artist Darren Cullen’s Pocket Money Loans (2012-present), Argentine artist Marta Minujín’s Payment of Greek Debt to Germany with Olives and Art (2017), and Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore’s Gone Indian (2009). I am in search of two parallel counter-currents: In the first place, the way dominant systems and structures of financialized power impose unpayable financial debts as a methodology of domination that secures exploitation, extraction, oppression and/or inequality; In the second place the way that these same systems and structures of financialized power depend upon the disappearance, denial or diversion of the unpayable debts owed to or claimed by the dominated and exploited on which they are, ultimately, based. My effort here is not to provide a comprehensive theorization of the topic of unpayable debts, but rather to map some coordinates that, between them, triangulate the particular ways that, in the current financialized global order, a dialectics of unpayability plays out.

Thomas Sankara (1949–87) was one of the most important anti-imperialist leaders of twentieth-century Africa. This book examines Sankara’s political philosophies and legacies and their relevance today. Contributors analyze his synthesis of Pan-Africanism and humanist Marxist politics, as well as his approach to gender, development, ecology, and decolonization.

In this study, we try to explore the effects of globalization and international integration on developing countries’ external debt in 1980-2010 time period. As known, the developing world consists of countries which desire to reach to the developed countries in economic sense. These countries head towards external debt, as it is difficult to realize their development with their insufficient internal sources. In recent half century, the oil shocks in 1973 and 1979, and the debt crises resulted, had been a turning point in the operation of decision mechanisms. Even the banking and financial crisis in 1990s and 2000s, developing countries continued to find out extra sources from internal and external markets. Especially in the last ten years, however, as a result of economic integration, internal and external sources are intertwined and substituted for each other. The study concentrates on the demand side of the external debt rather than the supply side; but occasionally, with fiscal and economical policies as well as international policies are mentioned. It is clear that supporting populist approach or policies of developing countries may lead them into new debt spirals which were also experienced historically. After theoretically examining the external debt, its determinants are empirically analyzed by using panel data analysis. By testing the models, results show that GDP growth ratio, fixed capital formation, population rates, terms of trade, capital flight, external debt services, external debt interest payments, urbanization, general government consumption expenditure and financial liberalization are the main determinants of external debt in developing countries. Keywords: External Debt, Developing Countries, Turkish Economy, Economical and Fiscal Structure, Panel Data Analysis Method. 1980-2010 yılları arası dönemde küreselleşme ve uluslararası entegrasyon faaliyetlerinin gelişmekte olan ülkelerde dış borçlanma üzerinde yarattığı etkiler bu çalışmanın araştırma konusunu oluşturmaktadır. Bilindiği üzere, gelişmekte olan ülkeler iktisadi anlamda gelişmiş olan ülkeleri yakalama gayreti içerisinde bulunan ülkelerdir. Bu ülkeler iktisadi sistem içerinde söz konusu kalkınma hamlesini kendi kaynakları ile gerçekleştirmeleri güç olduğu için dış kaynaklara yönelmektedirler. Dış borçlanmanın son yarım asırlık gelişiminde 1973 ve 1979 petrol şoklarının ve neden olduğu borç krizleri 1980’li yıllarda karar mekanizmalarının işleyişi açısından bir dönüm noktası olmuştur. Benzer şekilde, 1990’lı ve 2000’li yıllarda da gelişmekte olan ülkeler bankacılık ve finansal krizlerle sarsılırken iç ve dış piyasalardan borç arayışlarını sürdürmüşlerdir. Ancak özellikle son on yıllık sürece bakıldığında, ekonomik entegrasyon sonucu, iç ve dış kaynaklar birbirleri ile iç içe geçmiş ve birbirlerini ikame eder hale gelmiştir. Çalışmada dış borçlanma konusu arz tarafından çok talep yönüyle ele alınmış; ancak yeri geldikçe, mali ve iktisadi politikalar yanında uluslararası politikaların da aşırı borçlulukta rol oynadığına değinilmiştir. Yine bu çerçevede, popülist politikaların desteklenmesinin borç sarmallarının yeniden oluşmasına yol açabileceği belirtilmiş ve sözü edilen durumun geçmişteki örneklerine atıflarda bulunulmuştur. Gelişmekte olan ülkelerde dış borçlanma iktisadi ve mali politikalar perspektifinden kuramsal olarak incelendikten sonra belirleyici unsurları panel veri yöntemi ile ampirik olarak analiz edilmeye çalışmıştır. Test edilen modellerin ardından gelişmekte olan ülkelerde; GSYİH büyüme oranları, sabit sermaye oluşumu, nüfus, dış ticaret hadleri, sermaye kaçışları, dış borç servisleri, dış borç faiz ödemeleri, kentsel nüfus, kamu kesimi tüketim harcamaları ve finansal liberalizasyon değişkenlerinin dış borçlanmayı anlamada belirleyici olduğu sonucuna ulaşılmıştır. Anahtar Kelimeler: Dış Borçlanma, Gelişmekte Olan Ülkeler, Türkiye Ekonomisi, İktisadi ve Mali Yapı, Panel Veri Analizi Yöntemi.

La crisi finanziaria scoppiata nell’autunno 2008 ha sancito il successo di coloro che ne sono stati gli artefici. In Italia e Grecia sono andati al potere tecnocrati e banchieri, gli stessi che, fino al giorno prima, hanno lavorato per le istituzioni responsabili del crollo dell’economia. Ai vertici dei governi europei, delle istituzioni internazionali, dell’Unione europea (un «super Leviatano»), siedono i referenti delle banche e della finanza, nelle mani dei quali una classe politica incapace e inadeguata ha affidato le speranze di ripresa. Essi continuano a perseguire le politiche di impoverimento di 720 milioni di europei, con l’unico scòpo di trasformare il Vecchio Continente in un immenso lager di schiavi moderni: tagli, flessibilità, liberalizzazioni, privatizzazioni, queste le «ricette» per raggiungere falsi obiettivi: la riduzione del deficit ed il pareggio di bilancio (tecnicamente impossibile). Con la «privatizzazione» (svendita) delle ultime società pubbliche completeranno il disegno, raggiungendo l’obiettivo di distruzione degli Stati e della privazione dei più elementari diritti di cittadinanza. Sono politici, banchieri, economisti, editori, controllano i media, e attraverso essi ci tranquillizzano. Non possiamo illuderci che, coloro che hanno appiccato l’incendio, si trasformino improvvisamente in pompieri. Guardando i dati, viene spontaneo domandarsi come sia possibile che in soli tre anni dall’autunno 2008, il debito pubblico di alcuni Stati (Italia, Spagna, Portogallo, Irlanda) sia sensibilmente peggiorato. La risposta è semplice: la colpa è delle misure anti-crisi legate alle operazioni di sostegno al sistema bancario. Con i soldi dati alle banche a interessi irrisori (1.200 miliardi in Europa, e altrettanti negli Usa), queste non fanno altro che rifinanziare le loro obbligazioni o acquistare a loro volta il debito degli Stati, che è divenuto nel frattempo più oneroso da sostenere perchè è aumentato, e il rating è peggiorato. Le banche, quindi, chiedono interessi più alti agli Stati, e la voragine del debito pubblico aumenta in una spirale infinita. In tutto questo giro, chi ci guadagna, ancora una volta, sono proprio le banche. Ma come siamo arrivati fino a qui? Quali sono i sottili meccanismi che hanno privato gli Stati della loro sovranità? L’Ue, la Bce, l’euro, il Trattato di Lisbona, Basilea II, il Fmi, le agenzie di rating, sono tutti strumenti nelle mani della finanza, che ha piazzato i suoi uomini al vertice delle istituzioni nazionali e sovranazionali. Il potere, scippato da tecnocrati e banchieri, con la complicità di politici incapaci e corrotti, deve tornare nelle mani del popolo sovrano.

F*ck May 68, Fight Now: Exploring the Uses of the Radical Past from 1968 to Today

Session 1: History is a Weapon

June 8, 2018

Department of History, University of Liverpool

https://archive.discoversociety.org/2018/09/04/circumnavigating-the-past-foreclosing-the-future-commemoration-of-the-radical-past-in-the-amnesiac-present/

Most of the current analysis which attempts to explain the Greek crisis tends to follow two trends. The first highlights the Greek crisis as a debt-crisis provoked by extensive corruption in every level of social, economic and political life. There are two problems with this argument. The first one is that it does not take into account the European and global context within which the Greek crisis took place. The second one is that it transforms a capitalist crisis to a mere debt crisis of public mismanagement and at the same does not answer how this peculiar clientilistic form of corporatism was historically developed.
The second trend gives a partial answer to the first problem of the first analytical context as it is focused on the fragile Greek domestic demand model which was unable to compete with the stronger export economies within the context of the Eurozone. This point of view stresses
the structural weaknesses of the Eurozone and its weak fiscal and political union which were unable to protect the European economies, as a whole, against the global financial crisis. Greece is placed among other countries like Portugal, Ireland and Spain which did not have a
high public debt prior to the Eurozone crisis. This trend of argumentation offers a European and global analytical context but it needs to be accompanied with a historical analytical context of highlighting the role and impact of the Greek productive sphere for the formation of the Greek crisis. This paper aims to contribute in this direction by exploring the historical relation between the
Greek crisis of production in the 1980s, Greek membership in the Eurozone and the Greek sovereign debt crisis by applying Marxist political economy. It argues that the causes of the Greek sovereign debt crisis of 2010 can be traced back to the crisis of the Greek productive
sphere during the 1980s and in the implied Greek national economic strategies for the management of this crisis, based on the recovery of profit without the recovery of industrial growth. These strategies initiated the deterioration of the competitiveness of the Greek
productive sphere, a process which was aggravated through Greek membership in the Eurozone and easy access to the financial markets. The already burdened Greek public debt as part of the management of the crisis of production in the 1980s continued to increase within the context of the EMU, leading to the Greek sovereign debt crisis within the general context of the Eurozone crisis. However, the manifestation, dynamic and management of the Greek sovereign debt crisis based on austerity measures are also related to the economic and political structures of the Eurozone and the present analysis will take place within this
framework. In the theoretical part of the paper the dialectical method will be unfolded along
with the theoretical framework of Marxist political economy. The empirical approach is
revealed in two main parts. The first part focuses on highlighting the political, economic and
social class implications of European integration till the creation of EMU and its recent crisis
while the second part draws attention to the historical structural formation of the Greek crisis
and its dialectical relation with the European Monetary Union.

Staatsinsolvenzen sind ein topaktuelles Thema: Spätestens seit der Staatsschuldenkrise im Euroraum (auch kurz „Euro-Krise“ genannt)  infolge der weltweiten Finanz- und Wirtschaftskrise ist die Abwendung einer drohende Zahlungsunfähigkeit von Staaten eine brennende Frage, nicht nur für die betroffenen Staaten wie etwa Griechenland, Spanien oder Irland, sondern für alle Mitglieder der Eurozone, also auch für Deutschland. Doch Staatsinsolvenzen sind kein neues Thema: Seit der Erfindung des Geldes und des Kreditwesens  und der damit verbundenen Lösung von der rein materialbasierten Tauschwirtschaft sahen sich die Staatsgebilde dieser Welt mit dem Problem einer möglichen Zahlungsunfähigkeit konfrontiert. Der deutsche Politologe Uwe Wagschal geht sogar soweit zu behaupten, dass [d]ie Geschichte der Existenz von Staatswesen […] gleichzeitig eine Geschichte der Staatsverschuldung [ist]. Diese war in den vergangenen Jahrtausenden oft für das Scheitern von Regierungen und für Regimewechsel verantwortlich.  Wie viele es insgesamt gab, kann nur geschätzt werden,  aber wir wissen um die Auswirkungen vieler Staatspleiten auf die Menschheitsgeschichte: Ihretwegen wurden Regierungen gestürzt, politische Systeme ausgetauscht und Kriege geführt.

In Q2 of 2008 Spain officially announced its entrance in to what would come to be the worst recession of its economic history. Previously, the country had undergone nearly a decade of economic expansion, mainly stemming from a boom in real estate and construction. Ballooning housing prices created a severe accumulation of economic imbalances, making it vulnerable to shocks from that industry. Upon the bursting of the housing bubble, Spain underwent a vicious cycle of private debt problems; increasing unemployment levels, shrinking productivity, and a growing mistrust in the political system. This paper examines the different contributing factors in the evolution of the crisis, including deep economic, political, and banking flaws that were inherently present prior. It also examines the social consequences of the crisis, and analyzes how political authorities responded in their attempts to remedy the situation.

Hubris, Ate, and Nemesis are three minor Greek deities, mostly remembered today for their function in ancient Greek drama. Hubris symbolizes arrogance and deviation from virtue. Ate refers to an act of folly, a direct consequence of hubris, which provokes the wrath of gods and precipitates their intervention. Nemesis is the retribution of divine justice—painful but necessary to restore world balance and order. The ongoing, multifaceted crisis that has torn apart Greece’s economy and society since October 2009 can also be approached through the lens of this tragic classical trio.

The economic crisis of recent years continues to have a profound effect on the lives of European citizens. Economically, politically and socially, the crisis has led to fundamental change for many people's lives. As well as creating new concerns, the crisis has simultaneously exacerbated existing ones, raising profound challenges to the sustainability and success of the European model. This book seeks to examine this new 'social reality' of post-crisis Europe, exploring what both the EU and national governments can do to restore its strength, sustainability, cohesion and competitiveness.

The financial crisis that has been wreaking havoc in markets across the world since August 2007 had its origins in an asset price bubble that interacted with new kinds of financial innovations that masked risk; with companies that failed to follow their own risk management procedures; and with regulators and supervisors that failed to restrain excessive risk taking.

A bubble formed in the U.S. housing markets as home prices across the country increased each year from the mid 1990s to 2006, moving out of line with fundamentals like household income. Like traditional asset price bubbles, expectations of future price increases developed and were a significant factor in inflating house prices. As individuals witnessed rising prices in their neighborhood and across the country, they began to expect those prices to continue to rise, even in the late years of the bubble when it had nearly peaked.

When the 2008 crisis hit, governments, corporations and individuals defaulted on interest payments. However, government debt defaults are a recurring feature of public finance. These defaults have typically involved low-income and emerging-market economies, although recent cases include advanced-economy sovereigns.

Sovereign states have borrowed money for hundreds of years. Sovereign debt was one of the first financial assets ever traded, and continues to comprise a significant fraction of global financial assets. Unlike private debt, sovereign debt is especially difficult to enforce. For centuries, the legal doctrine of sovereign immunity limited suit against defaulting sovereigns, while few government assets are available for attachment in foreign jurisdictions.

Despite its repeated history of triggering major mistakes and crises, so much dubious financial risk management remains taken for granted and promoted by markets and regulators. As evermore sophisticated financial processes of operationalising and commodifying an indeterminate future subscribe to a false dichotomy between (quantitative) risk and (qualitative) uncertainty, this chapter problematises how it aggravates the asymmetric relationship between private, techno-scientific ‘epistocracy’ and public democracy. Conventional risk management is analysed through the categories of market/systematic risk, operational/business risk and credit risk to reveal their distortions and mistakes. Notwithstanding its repetitious failures, risk management/discourse performativity creates and legitimises the conditions and subjectivities that validate its continued utility and normative authority. Immunising market entities from serious public contestation/reform, this depoliticises the constitution of authoritative knowledge underpinning the political economy of finance.

Europe's response to the sovereign debt crisis in Southern Europe has been premised on the idea that these states can return to growth through internal devaluation and fiscal consolidation. This article explores the distributive consequences of that strategy in Greece, Portugal, Italy, and Spain. We argue that standard measures of poverty do not capture the deterioration in living standards as fully as anchored poverty. Moreover, we show that inequality trends conceal considerable re-ranking within the income distribution: those who were rich in 2012 had got richer in 2009-12, but those who were rich in 2009 lost ground in 2009-12. We find that in all four countries the new poor include significantly fewer pensioners and more unemployed workers, and are considerably poorer than the old poor had been. We demonstrate that there was significant variation in the magnitude and design of austerity, with Italy imposing a far smaller adjustment than Spain, and Portugal achieving less inequality in spite of robust fiscal consolidation. Nevertheless, even when austerity measures were designed to reduce inequality by compressing incomes downward, their second-order macro-economic effects ultimately increased inequality (except in Portugal). In the last section, we explore the political reasons for this variation.

Genealogie e sviluppi della crisi borsistico-finanziaria statunitense e i suoi effetti nell'economia globale. In particolare si analizza la correlazione con la crisi dei debiti sovrani in Europa e l'implementazione di politiche di austerità con forte valenza biopolitica e ordoliberale.

The goal of this research is to provide a mid-range rationalist explanation of the dynamics of institutional change occurred in the European Union during the sovereign debt crisis. My starting hypothesis is that the crisis may represent a driving force for the emergence of major institutional changes. Moreover, I claim that the policy outcomes adopted are not a pure reflection of actors’ bargaining powers, but they are decidedly mediated by the existent institutional rules, and the decision making process behind their adoption, i.e. intergovernmental or supranational, can be determinant for their successfulness. Taking stock of the institutional changes occurred between 2010 and 2014, the research aims at understanding whether the Eurozone crisis triggered a deepening of the European integration, reflected by any eventual upload of authority from the national to the supranational level. In order to assess these issues, I analyze three different economic policies, namely the progressive strengthening of the rules of fiscal discipline, the creation of the financial instruments to support member States in need and the progressive setup of a banking union in the EU. For each issue area, I search empirical validation of my starting hypotheses and I apply an original index to measure the “rate of supranationalism” of different aspects of the policy. By comparing the institutional setup before and after the crisis, I am able to provide an assessment of the eventual supranationalization of each single policy, then of the EU as a whole. My findings offer a substantive empirical validation of the leading hypotheses. Namely, I demonstrate that the timing of adoption of major policy outcomes is strongly related to the most acute phases of the crisis in terms of financial markets’ pressure. Moreover, I show that intergovernmental policy making tends to create only incremental outcomes and even institutional deadlocks, while supranational decision making produces more effective outcomes. Finally, the application of the original index suggests that over the last years the European integration undertook a deepening process, resulting in a widening of the scope of supranational policies, an intensification of EU institutions’ powers as well as different forms of authority delegation to supranational bodies. These patterns of supranationalization were mainly driven by the pressure of financial markets and by the necessity of overcoming the institutional deadlocks engendered by intergovernmental negotiations, demonstrating that the Eurozone crisis has represented a political momentum for transformative institutional changes in the EU.

The debt crisis in Greece since 2010 has triggered seismic changes in the political attitudes of the society and, above all, the political identity and discourse of the country. The extremely unpopular austerity policies caused a severe internal polarization which quickly translated into anti-German mass hysteria, vitriolic anti-EU rhetoric and sharp anti-austerity populism. This paper will endeavour to identify the origins, course and outcome of this dramatic shift in the political attitudes and identity in Greece and analyse them with the benefit of hindsight – almost six years after the eruption of the crisis.

Ejercicios para una vida endeudada E n los últimos años hemos asistido al desarrollo de una «mega-máquina» construida «a fin de maximizar y acumular, en forma de capital, y al mismo tiempo de poder, el valor extraíble del mayor número posible de seres humanos. [...] La extracción de valor tiende a abarcar todos y cada uno de los momentos y de los aspectos de la existencia». 1 Se trata de una auténtica «máquina social», que por su poderío «ha superado a todas las anteriores [...] debido a su extensión planetaria y a su penetración capilar en todos los subsistemas sociales y en todas las capas de la sociedad, de la naturaleza y de la persona». 2 Lo que ha permitido que ese mecanismo funcione de una forma tan ramificada es precisamente la estrecha relación que ha instaurado con la vida de los individuos y de las comunidades. Una condición primordial de este fenómeno es que se ha colocado a la empresa -a la empresa capitalista-en el centro de todas las relaciones sociales, llegando a individualizarse en la forma de «empresa de uno mismo».

The paper sets out the legal foundations of an incremental approach to sovereign debt restructuring. As the political momentum that would be necessary to adopt an international treaty governing sovereign debt workouts is currently lacking, the incremental approach explores the possibility of further developing current practice in line with legal principles that have emerged from progressive developments in debt restructuring practice in reaction to the crises of the last decades. Key among them is the principle of sovereign debt sustainability. Debt sustainability is a global concern today. This is evidenced by significant institutional, procedural and substantive innovations in the way in which sovereign debt is treated. Among them is the generalized conviction that debt sustainability cannot come at the expense of human rights enjoyment. The rise in holdout litigation does not contradict this finding, as it has been countered by a strong policy response. The incremental approach is not only unique because it overcomes the binary structure of a debate juxtaposing statutory, institutional and contractual, market-based approaches to improve the current debt restructuring framework. Rather, the incremental approach puts law and legal theory right at the center of the debate about sovereign debt that in the last decades has been dominated by economic thinking. It thereby claims that markets, including markets for sovereign debt, must be embedded in other social fields and therefore require regulation. The incremental approach is thus opposed to the idea of markets as spontaneous orders. However, given that knowledge is limited, market regulation that proceeds continuously and in small steps does not need to be less successful in its effort to avoid crises and solve collective action problems than grand proposals for institutional design.

Neoliberalism has grown to become the dominant political and economic agenda of our time. Its supporters hold influential positions across governments, education, the media and corporate and financial institutions, yet its effects have been largely negative for populations around the world: declining economic growth, together with most social indicators (life expectancy, mortality among infants, children, and adults, literacy, and education); increasing social and economic inequality; skewing of political power in the favour of wealthy interests; and an increase in financial activities leading to more frequent crises in which the costs are socialised. This research endeavoured to examine whether the BBC, an organisation dedicated to serving the public interest with impartial news reporting, could be said to support neoliberal interests. To do this it analysed how BBC2’s Newsnight reported the January 2015 election of the Greek political party Syriza. Syriza’s policies were markedly anti-neoliberal and thus represented a threat to the dominant economic interests of much of Europe, including the British Government. Utilising a mixed methods approach, the analysis found that through a combination of negative framing and the absence of any critical analysis or discussion of neoliberalism, BBC Newsnight’s overall reporting did in fact serve to support neoliberal interests.

In a manner similar to the postcolonialitalia research project, in my work I have been dealing with the South of Europe. I come from Portugal, where the conception of Southern Europe, even though it goes back centuries, has become current in the light of the present crisis. In fact, the historical problems of internal colonialisms, between North Europe and South Europe, return in the recent policies of the European Union. As academics and intellectuals, we need to be aware of the deep histories of such debates, the long term (longue durée), and the types of prejudices that compromise solutions of the present predicament. Such solutions need to afford dignity for people, and particularly for those seeking social protection and well-being in a society that is becoming increasingly exclusive and discriminatory. Europe has become a fortress which, though coveted from the outside (the so-called immigrants crisis), has increasingly hollowed out itself.

Is the Recovery Fund really the new Marshall Plan, as we hear more and more often in many places and contexts? With the aim of critically verifying this leitmotif, the essay first traces back the nature, the structure and the conditionalities of the Marshall Plan, also highlighting its less known and declared aspects, also in terms of geopolitical strategies. It then analyses the current Recovery Fund and its functioning, which unequivocally shows the return of the “vincolo esterno” as an instrument of internal policy and, revitalizing at least apparently the European Union, is part of a wider dialectic between Neo-Atlanticism, Build Back Better World (B3W) and Belt & Road Initiative (BRI). In this context, the Recovery Fund, with similarities but also substantial differences with the Marshall Plan, far from constituting a truly historic 'moment', rather seems to be a missed opportunity on the road to European construction.

Pubblichiamo un eccellente testo di Vladimiro Giacchè nel quale è ricostruita la vicenda storica
dell’Italia nell’euro, il passaggio di fase in corso, l’interpretazione del Governo Conte 2 e la sua
valutazione critica sulla scelta di Patria e Costituzione di provare a giocare la partita nella
maggioranza M5S-Pd-Renzi-LeU.