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Mark Ames of Pando Interviews Your Humble Blogger on Greece
By I hope you’ll enjoy this interview with Mark Ames: Naked Capitalism: “We are in the business of making trouble.”
It’s unlocked only for the next 48 hours, so please check it out soon!
Also, there’s one small correction that didn’t get into the version that Mark put up. Hopefully it will be revised soon, but in case you see the article before Mark makes the update, I make a statement about “negative interest rates” that should read “negative real interest rates”.
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Excerpt:
This year’s political drama in Greece stands out as perhaps the least-understood, worst-reported major story of 2015.
Greece is mired in debt, and locked into the Euro monetary system, which means Greece’s political destiny is in the hands of the European Central Bank, the IMF and the powerful nations that dominate the Eurozone, Germany and France —and not in the hands of Greece’s “demos,” its voting public.
The implications of Greece’s political-financial struggles are huge—we could be seeing the beginning of the end of not only the Euro monetary union, but also the half-baked EU political union as well. We could also see a more globalized unraveling, but thanks to the financial world’s intentionally shady machinations, we won’t know until we know. Greece is also a major ideological battleground between a re-emerging and more radicalized western Left—Syriza—and entrenched neoliberalism, which has dominated the political ecosystem for the past few decades. The outcome could affect the fate of a lot of fledgling neo-leftist politics across the globe, and in the West in particular.
Finance stories are always complicated and by design murky—add in the layers of EU politics, and you have a story that can only be told by someone with deep finance knowledge, a grasp of the larger political and cultural inputs, and the rare ability to translate it all into vivid, sharp-tongued, and aggressively readable prose.
Which is why you should be following Yves Smith great finance blog, NakedCapitalism.com. Yves Smith is the nom de plume of Susan Webber, a 35-year veteran of the financial world at firms ranging from McKinsey and Goldman Sachs to Sumitomo Bank. Her blog has been highly regarded from its inception in late 2006, earning Top 25 ranking in Time magazine and CNBC and plaudits from Wired; regular appearances on the Bill Moyers Show and Harry Shearer’s Le Show, and praise from the likes of economist Nouriel Roubini. Yves Smith is the author of ECONned, a merciless takedown of the economics profession and its relevance to finance, and is a Harvard grad who spent her formative years in quite a few American small towns as a “paper mill brat.”
