As Yanis Varoufakis points out there are four sub-crisis: a banking crisis, a crisis of under-investment, a social crisis and a public debt crisis – the result of five years of policy failure.
The first crisis is the banking crisis. Sweeping in from North America it’s proven useful to demonstrate how the Eurozone has been unable to deal with it successfully. The investment crisis is the second one. No practical offsetting tool – e.g. public spending nor currency devaluation – is capable to work as a backstop in the downward spiraling of its living standards. Europe now has an even more uneven distribution of investment between its surplus and deficit regions. Then comes the social crisis. Unemployment leads the way to a loss in social dignity for many people as do public pension cuts and the inability to access basic goods; the third crisis is paving the way to political (mainly) and social unrest. Then we have our fourth (and last) crisis: the debt crisis. The founding principle of perfectly separable public debts has forced a sequence of creative plans (the temp ESFS, the perm ESM and rocket launcher OMT) to guard sovereign debtors from speculation in the attempt to mitigate market turbulence now subsided.
Playing poker the deck would have been very generous with us, Europeans. It seems though we’re playing with a swindler, instead.
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