In an article for Monthly Review, UMass Amherst economics professor emeritus, Rick Wolff, outlines Greece’s role in the global capitalist crisis. According to Wolff, although Greece’s role is minor in relation to the central causes of the crisis, Greece faced an economic downturn as a result of the crisis and, like so many other nations, borrowed a lot. Now, lenders are requiring them to pay much higher interest rates on their current debt obligations and are also threatening to stop lending unless poorer countries, like Greece, lower the ratio between their debt and their GDP.
The Stakes in “Punishing” Greece
by Rick Wolff
February 11, 2010
The global capitalist crisis first brought an economic downturn to Greece, and now the “recovery” seeks to impose on the Greek people an indefinite period of economic suffering as global lenders provide funds to the richer, larger capitalist economies elsewhere so that they can avoid what is demanded of the Greeks. The same leaders of business and government who produced the crisis are managing the “recovery” in just this way.