{"id":21616,"date":"2013-08-13T10:44:22","date_gmt":"2013-08-13T15:44:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=21616"},"modified":"2013-08-13T10:44:22","modified_gmt":"2013-08-13T15:44:22","slug":"its-accurate-to-describe-the-greek-plight-as-a-depression","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/08\/13\/its-accurate-to-describe-the-greek-plight-as-a-depression\/","title":{"rendered":"It&#8217;s accurate to describe the Greek plight as a depression"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.cityam.com\/article\/1376355091\/greece-s-catastrophic-1930s-style-depression-salutary-tale\" target=\"_blank\">Allister Heath<\/a> says the catastrophic state of the Greek economy fully merits the descriptor &#8220;depression&#8221;:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Sorry, but the fact that Greece collapsed at an annual rate of 4.6 per cent in the second quarter, rather than a little bit faster, isn\u2019t good news. It\u2019s terrible, awful, horrible news. Greek output is down by 23 per cent since 2008 and unemployment is at around 28 per cent; no wonder, given the shrinking economy, that gross tax revenues are continuing to undershoot targets.<\/p>\n<p>Hyperbolic economists sometime claim that the UK has undergone a depression, which is nonsense &mdash; but Greece\u2019s woes cannot be described in any other way. Its depression has been catastrophic, one of the worst ever recorded for any country in the modern, industrialised era (apart from during or immediately after a war). Its dramatic collapse reminds us that stupid economic policies can destroy a nation; depressions have not been banished from modern civilisation.<\/p>\n<p>It may be, of course, that the collapse is beginning to abate and that the economy may finally stabilise next year. I\u2019ll believe it when I see it; unless Greece\u2019s money supply starts growing again, and demand begins to increase, a recovery is impossible. But Greece is just a tiny part of the Eurozone, so achieving such an outcome is even harder than in a country like the UK, especially given that the Greek financial crisis hasn\u2019t really gone away. There is no way that Athens will meet its bailout targets and its debt burden is utterly unsustainable. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Allister Heath says the catastrophic state of the Greek economy fully merits the descriptor &#8220;depression&#8221;: Sorry, but the fact that Greece collapsed at an annual rate of 4.6 per cent in the second quarter, rather than a little bit faster, isn\u2019t good news. It\u2019s terrible, awful, horrible news. Greek output is down by 23 per [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,62,1526],"tags":[71,337,118],"class_list":["post-21616","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-europe","category-greece","tag-debt","tag-eu","tag-taxes"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5CE","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21616","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21616"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21616\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21617,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21616\/revisions\/21617"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}