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| Financial Turbulence Shakes the Eurozone: Facing the Debt Crisis in Europe |
| 16.07.11 09:34 |
European trends |
| One of the avatars of the financial sector crisis that began in 2007 in the United States and spread like wildfire to Europe, is the enthusiasm shown by Western European banks (especially German and French banks[2], but also Belgian, Dutch, British, Luxemburg and Irish ones) in using funds lent or donated massively by the Federal Reserve and the ECB to increase their loans to several Eurozone countries between 2007 and 2009 (Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain) racking up juicy profits due the higher interest rates there. For example: between June 2007 (beginning of the subprime crisis) and September 2008 (Lehman Brothers bankruptcy) loans by private Western European banks to Greece rose by 30%, from 120 to 160 billion Euros. |
| Damien Millet and Eric Toussaint |
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| Eurozone needs more clarity |
| 09.02.11 10:24 |
European trends |
| As Europe lurched from one disaster to another last year, with even large economies like Spain and Italy being under threat, the 27 member states of the European Union agreed May 9, 2010, to the creation of the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) in order to financially support euro-area member states in difficulties supposedly caused by exceptional circumstances beyond their control. |
| Asia Times Online |
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| French horror at Anglo-Saxon reforms |
| 12.10.10 10:41 |
European trends |
| In France this week, more than two million workers took to the streets to protest against proposals to raise the retirement age. But the harsh economic climate may continue to threaten the traditional French way of life. |
| BBC News |
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| Why Doesnt Europe Need God? |
| 13.09.10 05:50 |
European trends |
| “Yes, the Moslems have come to you, but Islam is even more strict about moral values than Christianity, and doesn’t allow any compromise,” I noted. "It is just as decisively against those abortions, contraceptives, and divorces that are so dear to your hearts. With what new religion do you liberals counter? Who are your idols and authorities?” |
| Pravoslavie.ru |
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| Europe in Crisis |
| 14.01.10 12:13 |
European trends |
| At the start of the last decade, in March 2000, the European Union heads of state announced the Lisbon Strategy. Its aim, by 2010, was to make Europe “the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world, capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion.” This would create “the conditions for full employment and the strengthening of regional cohesion in the European Union.” |
| Peter Schwarz |
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| Death agony of Thatcher deregulated finance model |
| 23.01.09 15:08 |
European trends |
| During the end of the 1970’s into the 1980’s British Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the City of London financial interests who backed her, introduced wholesale measures of privatization, state budget cuts, moves against labor and deregulation of the financial markets. She did so in parallel with similar moves in the USA initiated by advisers around President Ronald Reagan. The claim was that hard medicine was needed to curb inflation and that the bloated state bureaucracy was a central problem. For almost three decades, Anglo-American university economic faculties have turned to Thatcherite deregulation of financial markets as ‘the efficient way,’ in the process, undoing many of the hard-fought gains secured for personal social security, public health care and pension security of the population. Now the ‘poster child’ economy of the Thatcher Revolution, Great Britain, is sinking like the proverbial Titanic, a testimony to the incompetence of what is generally called Neo-liberalism or free market ideology. |
| F. William Engdahl |
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