Re: <nettime> Larry Elliott: Europe's liberal illusions shatter as

[Keith Hart <keith@thememorybank.co.uk>]

   It is true that the euro is a Greek trgedy in both the ancient and
   modern senses. Elliot and Atkinson refer only the contemporary screw-up
   and all� the terrible stuff done to and by Greeks today. But this
   superficial journalism.

   The concept of hamartia refers to errors that people made in the past
   and that come to haunt them later. These are often unconscious, as for
   example when Oedipus kills a man who turns out to have been his father.
   So the question concerning the euro is what were the original mistakes
   and can their victims actually do antthng about them now? The biggest
   mistake was imagining that a single currency could handle the economic
   diversity of such a region, that money by itself could generate
   political union, the neoliberal view that markets can and should trump
   politics, the failure to account for unequal trade balances between
   member states, especially Germany, excessive bets in credit markets by
   the French and German banks, the democratic deficit and so on.

   These add up to a series of errors that are still hardly understood in
   Brussels and Frankfurt and, taken together, in my view,� they nail the
   hamartia as irreversible and fatal, whatever tinkering the bureaucrats
   come up with. I said so in 2002, comparing the euro unfavourably with
   the Argentiain peso.

   Keith

   On Mon, May 2, 2016 at 9:32 AM, Patrice Riemens <[1]patrice@xs4all.nl>
   wrote:

    Save for the refugee crisis in Greece, which would be in itself enough
    to bring a national government to its knees, one has not heard very much
    of late of that country's pack of Elephants in the room, aka the Bailout
    Charade. Well, it's back again, in full force, in case anyone forgets.
    And it doesn't look good at all.  Meanwhile, in the Aegean ...

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