Der Spiegel reports on how Greek society is adapting to the many “austerity measures” that have been enacted in recent months. It sounds as though the painful (yet much needed) lowered expectations of what government can and should provide are well underway.

The austerity measures that were supposed to fix Greece’s problems are dragging down the country’s economy. Stores are closing, tax revenues are falling and unemployment has hit an unbelievable 70 percent in some places. Frustrated workers are threatening to strike back.
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The government’s draconian austerity measures have managed to reduce the country’s budget deficit by an almost unbelievable 39.7 percent, after previous governments had squandered tax money and falsified statistics for years. The measures have reduced government spending by a total of 10 percent, 4.5 percent more than the EU and International Monetary Fund (IMF) had required.

The problem is that the austerity measures have in the meantime affected every aspect of the country’s economy. Purchasing power is dropping, consumption is taking a nosedive and the number of bankruptcies and unemployed are on the rise. The country’s gross domestic product shrank by 1.5 percent in the second quarter of this year. Tax revenue, desperately needed in order to consolidate the national finances, has dropped off. A mixture of fear, hopelessness and anger is brewing in Greek society.

They go on to provide a number of anecdotal accounts about how life has changed for both individuals and communities with conditions not likely to improve any time soon given that massive layoffs are expected this fall.

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Not that my opinion really matters, but, I’m not sure if I like the picture of younger, smirking Ambrose or older, frailer Ambrose better. Or, for that matter, worse.

It’s always funny when you see photos like these updated because the changes usually happen many years apart and, all at once, readers are confronted with a much older writer behind the words they are reading. That’s why I don’t ever plan to update my pictures here at the blog that are now about five years old…

Anyway, one thing that hasn’t changed about Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is his dour view on the prospects for the euro, his latest thinking distilled in this story at the Telegraph.

Europe’s fiscal Fascism brings British withdrawal ever closer

The European Commission is calling for EU powers to vet budgets of the 27 member states before the draft laws have been presented to the House of Commons, the Tweede Kamer, the Folketing, the Bundestag, the Assemblee Nationale, or other national parliaments. It applies to Britain even though we are not in EMU.

Fonctionnaires and EU finance ministers will pass judgement on the British (or Dutch, or Danish, or French) budgets before the elected bodies of these ancient and sovereign nations have seen the proposals. Did we not we not fight the English Civil War and kill a king over such a prerogative?

Yet again we are discovering the trick played on our democracies by Europe’s insiders when they charged ahead with EMU, brushing aside warnings by their own staff economists that monetary union was unworkable without fiscal union. Jacques Delors knew perfectly well that this would lead inevitably to a crisis, but it would be the “beneficial crisis” that would force sovereign parliaments to submit to demands that they would never otherwise accept.

It comes as no surprise that Club Med debt and obstinance of the already austere Germans are at the center of Ambrose’s most recent complaint about goings on in Europe.

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