Daily Archives: February 18, 2015

Greece wants to save Europe, but can it persuade Europeans?

By Pavlina Tcherneva
Cross posted from aljazeera.com

Most analysis of the Greek debt crisis ignores an important reality: While Greece may be the villain du jour, every eurozone nation is profoundly short of cash. That’s because of a well-acknowledged, but not fully appreciated, flaw at the heart of eurozone financial architecture that converted a historically unprecedented number of nations from issuers of their own currency to users of a common currency.

Greece is simply the first country to experience the extreme consequences of that loss of monetary sovereignty. With no independent source of funding, no currency of its own, no central bank to guarantee its government liabilities, it has had to ask others for help. And as a condition for securing that help, Greece has until now been forced to consent to radical austerity policies.

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The HSBC Scandal: A Red Flag for U.S. Regulators?

NEP’s Bill Black appears on Knowledge@Wharton discussing the HSBC scandal with Jennifer Blouin. You can see the story and hear the podcast here.