As things go from bad to worse in the eurozone the putative adults have begun to fight openly in front of the kids. The putative adults, of course, have refused to act like adults for six years and instead have lived in a fantasy world in which austerity – bleeding the patient – is the optimal response to a recession. As many of us have been warning for six years, this is a great way to create gratuitous recessions and even the Great Depression levels of unemployment in three nations of the periphery with 100 million citizens.
Italy has been forced by German demands for austerity into a third recession in six years, with France likely to experience the same fate. Even Germany has stagnated and could fall into recession. Instead of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, the three horses that make up a troika consist of the European Central Bank (ECB), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the European Commission (EC). The troika combined to force the entire eurozone to inflict austerity in response to the Great Recession.
