Paul Krugman at The New York Times writes—Ending Greece’s Bleeding:
But the campaign of bullying — the attempt to terrify Greeks by cutting off bank financing and threatening general chaos, all with the almost open goal of pushing the current leftist government out of office — was a shameful moment in a Europe that claims to believe in democratic principles. It would have set a terrible precedent if that campaign had succeeded, even if the creditors were making sense.
What’s more, they weren’t. The truth is that Europe’s self-styled technocrats are like medieval doctors who insisted on bleeding their patients — and when their treatment made the patients sicker, demanded even more bleeding. A “yes” vote in Greece would have condemned the country to years more of suffering under policies that haven’t worked and in fact, given the arithmetic, can’t work: austerity probably shrinks the economy faster than it reduces debt, so that all the suffering serves no purpose. The landslide victory of the “no” side offers at least a chance for an escape from this trap.
But how can such an escape be managed? Is there any way for Greece to remain in the euro? And is this desirable in any case?
There's more pundits on the Greek referendum and other topics below the fold.
And because you're no doubt eager to know what The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board had to say about the Greek referendum, here it is—The Greeks Say No:
It’s true the Greeks were given two bad choices, but they still chose the worst. Europe was offering more money to forestall a crisis in return for pension cuts and other reforms. Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras claimed a “no” vote would help him extract better terms—by which he means even higher growth-killing taxes in return for fewer pension cuts. The Greeks chose the Tsipras ultimatum strategy, so they can’t blame the Germans for what comes next.
The big question now is whether German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other Europeans will flinch. Mrs. Merkel has not wanted to be seen as driving Greece from the eurozone, and the referendum means that the Greeks will have driven themselves out, if that’s what happens in the coming weeks. Mr. Tsipras will claim he has a mandate to demand more European concessions, but that mandate ends at the Greek border. He has no open-ended claim on the other taxpayers of Europe.
Robert Naiman at Common Dreams writes—Bernie Sanders Will End the IMF's Economic Violence in Greece and Africa:
I'm all for pushing Bernie to talk more about downsizing the Pentagon to be an institution focused on actually defending the United States, as opposed to running around the world overthrowing other people's governments - a Pentagon that "goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy," as President John Quincy Adams put it.
But we should also take advantage of the new opportunity that now presents itself; it's not only with bombs that U.S. foreign policy kills and injures innocent civilians.
Great to know Angela Merkel so much better now .. :) .. along the way on reading (think it was in your first Spiegel) that one Europe rule was that they could not print money to bail out a country, it surprised, and i wondered how that rule and the QE which they had belatedly taken on equated, so then picked up this Bloomberg QuickTake
Europe’s QE Quandary
Why the ECB is Finally Buying Bonds
By Jana Randow | Updated Jun 18, 2015 1:32 PM EDT
It’s the new conventional wisdom: When all else fails to make economies grow, create new money and buy government bonds. That’s the formula dubbed quantitative easing, or QE. Most economists think it helped keep the U.S. and the other countries that used it – Japan and the U.K. – from tumbling into a catastrophic depression. Could it work in Europe, too? It’s difficult for the 19-nation euro area to do the same thing, partly because of different interpretations of European Union rules, and partly because of concern it could undermine efforts to push governments to do more to revive their economies. But now that the European Central Bank has exhausted most other options, it’s pressing ahead with full-blown QE.
"He proposed that the Commission be granted greater powers -- on budgetary oversight, for example. Juncker wasn't trying to launch a revolution, nor was he trying to lay the cornerstone of a European government or to eliminate European nation-states. It was nothing more than an attempt to draw a couple of practical consequences from the euro crisis.
But Merkel doesn't even want that. At the press conference following the summit, she spoke about everything: about Greece, about refugees trying to cross the Mediterranean, about Jacques Delors, who had been named an honorary citizen of Europe. Regarding Juncker's proposal, she had but one thing to say: she "took note of it." In politician-speak, that essentially means: Forget it."
toward a more structurally integrated Europe encapsulated much of her .. it seemed to encapsulate one of Europe's, and Merkel's, real problems .. the article above which by then was on tab seems to deal with Merkel's mindset, too .. she seems to be as ideologically fixed as she sees Tsipras, yet vacillates more in the crunch.
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