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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   35518 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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The QE program has been keeping the politics of default-likely countries in a very uneasy suspense for 10 years at this point. Even the most radical anti establishment parties such as Syriza or five star had to quickly back down when faced with the consequences of rocking the boat on the QE ship.

I strongly feel we are heading for a catastrophic breaking point soon as the inflation and devaluation pressures on the ECB will finally break the ridiculously unsustainable QE arrangements and the populist politics won’t be constrained by that dam anymore.

I don't think this is very relevant. The fiscal policy of the euro states is decided by the ECB's constraints. Whether a government has a populist stance or not usually changes absolutely nothing with regard to how much they spend. At most they can make a rhetorical show out of it.

I have actually read some of Varoufakis' books. He is insufferable as a person but also has a very clear grasp of naked power relations behind all the technical jargon of economics. According to himself, what he tried to do as the finance minister was to use the Greek bankruptcy in order to blackmail the EU into giving him a better deal since a Greek bankruptcy would likely bring down the entire euro with chain bankruptcies of exposed German/France/Dutch banks. He posits that his cabined and PM were cowards and not capable of committing to what they started. The threat of Italian bankruptcy is absolutely nuclear when compared to tiny Greece. If an Italian leader is willing to actually use it (with the credibility to follow through), this would open up a whole new dimension of crazy.

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