But this was not a bailout. Greece was never bailed out. [...] Greece's bailout, then Ireland's, then Portugal's, then Spain's primarily rescue packages for French and German banks.
The result was that German workers, as their share of their employers' profits fell, could not afford the goods they produced. Deprived of domestic demand, surplus German products thus flowed to places like Ireland, Greece and Spain, where demand for them was supported by the loans Franz and his Fr…
John Major, Britain's prime minister [...] committed his government to shunning 'the soft option, the devaluer's option that would be a betrayal of our future and our children's future'. It was the signal speculators needed, with George Soros famously ahead of the pack, to take the British governme…
[...] France's treasury director at the time, a certain Jean-Claude Trichet, expressed the French authorities' hubris admirably. In a bid to refute the plain truth that the Deutsche Mark was the anchor keeping the EMS-ERM system grounded, he denied the dominance of the German currency with the extr…
[...] The gold standard was underpinned by the idea of depoliticizing money by linking its quantity to the amount of gold--a metal that politicians could not conjure up from thin air since it was provided exogenously by nature. Today the same fantasy of apolitical money can be foudn not just in the…
