Richard Wolff, UMass Amherst emeritus economics professor, was recently interviewed by Harry Konstantinidis, UMass Amherst economics doctoral candidate, for the Greek newspaper, Avgi. During the interview Wolff addresses questions about the economic recovery in the United States, noting that the U.S. should take advantage of the opportunity to form communist class-structured enterprises. He also discusses the ongoing financial crisis in Greece and points out that part of the reason Greece has had a hard time securing additional loans, and the reason they are paying such a higher interest rate for the loans they do secure, is because lenders put much of their money in the U.S.
Interview with Athens, Greece, daily newspaper, Avgi
Richard Wolff
June 6, 2010
The US government borrowed trillions of dollars to rescue US capitalism. Suddenly, private lenders around the world realized that they could put all of the money they wanted to lend to governments in the one safest country, the US. There was suddenly no need and no willingness to lend to other countries that were riskier borrowers than the mighty US. It was not that Greece or Portugal or Spain had become that much riskier than they had been last year. It was rather that the capitalist crisis in the US had changed the global credit system in ways that brought loanable funds to the US and made them much, much costlier for those other countries. Credit markets were working to shift the costs of the crisis from the US to Europe.