Europe has become a ruled by neo-liberal economists and ideas who play with models that have no relation to the real world and when they are applied to the real world, they fail badly.
It is no less than a nightmare.
Austerity politics in Europe is not simply a short-term conflict between the surplus countries like Germany in the center and the deficit countries like Greece, Finland, Portugal, Spain and Ireland on the periphery.
Deficit countries is a balance effect in the eurozone, and at least one country must incur deficits for every other nation that runs a surplus. It is an unknown fact for these contries that this is simply a logical consequence of a macroeconomic balance sheet with sectoral balances, which applies to all nations, monetary sovereign or not.
But here it i used to inflict terrible hardship on people, and it is done in sovereign countries too.
For sovereign nations like Sweden this is an almost incomprehensible self inflicted injury.
Austerity is not how to bring new money into the economy, its about scarsity and more of a long-term political agenda that privileges lenders over debtors and capital over labor.
What this is doing is to create great difficulties for the local domestic markets, our domestic companies and our small cities in rural areas. All which are being replaced by global supply chains. And global corporations. Promoting export is being thought of as the “brokers” of all the money that’s available to us.
Its all about governments looking after themselves and allowing their citizens to go down the drain. Domestic companies will not invest when the domestic sales environments are weak, and investments are weak because companies do not see any substantial changes in monetary policy.
Right now, money in the current system is debt, and the only way that we can bring new money into the economy and to provide companies with cash is to borrow it from our banks.
We do not need austerity to create savings which we then can use to make investments to create wealth and restore our welfare.
This is household thinking. Households do not create any new money. Therefore we cannot actually save or make cutbacks if we also want to invest.
The money must first be spent into the economy before they can be saved!
And contrary to common belief, corporate economy itself is NOT the “broker” of the money that’s available to be used in the world.
The only way for our governments to deal with this in our current financial system, is either to create the conditions for everyone to be able to take on more debt, or to reclaim its constitutional control over the money supply including digital money or deposits.
The importance of the latter is that all new money is first spent for the interests of society as a whole, and first used for our common purposes.
This is why austerity is such a nightmare. Its an ideological choice, not an inevitability.