L’austérité en Europe est une folie

Infographie : F. Descheemaekere

Europe’s Austerity Madness

[The New York Times]

Paul Krugman est un économiste américain né en 1953. Depuis 1999, il fait partie des éditorialistes de pointe du New York Times. En 2008, il a obtenu le prix Nobel d'économie pour ses travaux sur la mondialisation. Professeur d'économie et de relations internationales à l'Université de Princeton, il est l'auteur d'une vingtaine d'ouvrages sur le commerce et la finance internationaux. Depuis les années 1990, Paul Krugman a acquis une renommée internationale pour ses essais grand public qui font de lui un des économistes les plus influents de son époque.

So much for complacency. Just a few days ago, the conventional wisdom was that Europe finally had things under control. The European Central Bank, by promising to buy the bonds of troubled governments if necessary, had soothed markets. All that debtor nations had to do, the story went, was agree to more and deeper austerity — the condition for central bank loans — and all would be well.

But the purveyors of conventional wisdom forgot that people were involved. Suddenly, Spain and Greece are being racked by strikes and huge demonstrations. The public in these countries is, in effect, saying that it has reached its limit: With unemployment at Great Depression levels and with erstwhile middle-class workers reduced to picking through garbage in search of food, austerity has already gone too far. And this means that there may not be a deal after all. Much commentary suggests that the citizens of Spain and Greece are just delaying the inevitable, protesting against sacrifices that must, in fact, be made. But the truth is that the protesters are right.
More austerity serves no useful purpose; the truly irrational players here are the allegedly serious politicians and officials demanding ever more pain.

Lire : nytimes.com