Sunday 19 February 2012

Has Greece suffered enough?


As the Greek parliament passed measures for more austerity and reform, the Greek public took to the streets to show their displeasure with this ensuing policy.  The new financial measures are designed to aid Greece’s private sector debt restructuring and bring down the amount they owe from 160-120% of GDP.  However just as in the UK, the politics of austerity is not working and the private sector jobs that were set to replace the public sector job cuts haven’t materialised in the magnitude expected. The economy continues to shrink, whist unemployment rises.   This lack of growth will no doubt play out in the election in April, as Greece citizens become increasingly frustrated with the lack of prospects for jobs and growth as Greece implements over 3 billion Euros worth of cuts.  It is the ordinary citizen that will suffer as jobs, wages and pensions are cut.  This is turn will lead to a decrease in spending by those people affected, which will in turn perpetuate the cycle of low growth.  However the reality is Greece has little choice in the matter.

2 comments:

  1. It is rather very unfortunate for the Greek citizens as what is currently happening in Greece is now similar to what David Cameron and George Osborne are doing which is dragging UK economy into disaster and years of negative growth.

    While we rejoice in the fact that UK is not actually part of Euro, it does at the same time feel like we are really part of Euro. This is due to the fact that George Osborne thinks that the current economic crisis in UK is due to the crisis in Europe but at the same time, the Chancellor feels there is nothing he can do about it.

    Both George Osborne and David Cameron think that the crisis is an uncontrollable thunderstorm which can neither be avoided nor be stopped. The fact that there has been a very stunted growth makes the UK economic situation even worse as we now have to sit tight and look on as the Prime Minister and the Chancellor continue to experiment while blaming everything in sight they could find.

    The worst part of the whole situation is that the media is not helping the current financial crisis either as they are failing to dig deep in order to hold this coalition Govt to account.

    It does appear like no one is interested in pointing out the fact that UK has already pumped £325B as a quantitative easing into the economy. Does this count as part of the borrowing the Govt said they will never do? Nobody knows.

    My humble advice to David Cameron and George Osborne is that it is now nearly 24 months since they took over Govt and yet there has not been a single growth in the UK economy. Since both of them does not appear to know or understand how to solve this problem called economic crisis, why not make way so that new leadership can take over to secure British economy rather than pile up so much debt for Labour come 2015 general election or before then if the LibDems could be very sensible enough to quit.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Quite right Genevieve and just to prove further their plan isn't working, they now have to borrow ever increasing amounts of money.

    ReplyDelete