*** MICHALIS IGNATIOU: Troïka: La route vers la destruction... Le « sauvetage » de la Grèce par le biais de documents du FMI, des Américains et de la Commission, ainsi que des responsabilités tragiques de politiciens grecs. Editions Livanis (98 Solonos, GR-10680 Athens. Tel: (30-210) 3661200 - Fax: 3617791 - Email: webmaster@livanis.gr - Internet: http://www.livanis.gr ). 2015, 544 pp, €18.90. ISBN 978-960-14-2959-5.
On Saturday 21 November 2009, five leaders of the European Commission, Eurogroup, the European Central Bank, the Greek government and the Bank of Greece, accompanied by a handful of assistants, met in the capital of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. Where exactly did they meet? In the office of the then prime minister of Luxembourg, Jean-Claude Juncker, who at the time also chaired the grouping of eurozone finance ministers. At his side were figures who had travelled to Luxembourg from Frankfurt, Brussels and Athens. There was the president of the European Central Bank (French national Jean-Claude Trichet), Commissioner Joaquim Almunia, Greek finance minister George Papakonstantinou and the Governor of the Bank of Greece, George Provopoulos. The cream of the crop at a time when the US subprime crisis was in the process of spreading.
Officially, this intimate meeting never took place: it was even organised under the absolute precondition that it would remain mega-secret and never be revealed. But that wasn't counting for the work of reporter Michalis Ignatiou, a correspondent of Greek television channel Mega and the Ethnos newspaper in Washington, not far from the headquarters of the International Monetary Fund and other bodies. His investigation, which this book is based on, ended up revealing an open secret because the holding of the meeting was gradually revealed by a confidential Eurogroup source and then confirmed by former Greek finance minister Papakonstantinou. It seems that Greece was asked at this shadowy meeting to apply measures to reduce the deficit for the year 2010 - rather than the year 2009. On the day, Juncker, Trichet and Almunia sent the then Greek prime minister, George Papandreou, a 'mini Memorandum' that they hoped would nip the crisis in the bud. But Papandreou never got back to them … And that is how Greece entered the path to destruction! At the end of his investigation, the reporter concludes that the country had had the misfortune to fall into the hands of leaders incapable of understanding the true dimensions of the crisis that was about to explode and incapable of managing it.
To write the book, Michalis Ignatiou interviewed 139 protagonists: representatives of the Greek government, the IMF, the US government, the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank and the European Commission. He also relied on documents - secret documents even - from the IMF, the US ambassador in Athens and the European Commission, Excellent journalism that is already upsetting the apple cart in the Greek capital!
Thanassis Kalfas
*** GEORGE STAMATIS: La route vers le mémorandum. Le contexte économique et social 2007-2009. Editions Nissos (14 rue Sarri, GR-10553 Athens. Tel: (30-210) 3250058 - Fax: 3250058 - Email: info@nissos.gr - Internet: http://www.nissos.gr ). 2015, 101 pp, €20. ISBN 978-960-9535-84-7.
Unlike what everyone thinks, it wasn't after 2009 that the memorandum policy started to be applied under the pretext of Greece's public debt, but at best at the start of the 1990s in the name of the 'modernisation' ideology. It is the road towards the Memorandum that is traced and travelled in this book by a professor of economic theory at Pantheon University in Athens. George Stamatis goes back to the foundations of the objectives that are currently pursued, analysing the country's economic policy in the light of texts that explain the importance of high and rising prices. He also looks at the aims pursued with reform in the domains of social security and higher education. The author thus helps the reader form a coherent picture of what is really at stake and understand that the memorandum policy is simply 'modernisation' that will end up being favourable in the end.
(AKa)
*** PANAGIOTIS ROUMELIOTIS: Témoignage personnel: la toile de fond inconnue du recours au FMI. Comment et pourquoi nous en sommes arrivés au Memorandum. Editions Livanis (see above). 'Politique-Economie/La réalité grecque' series. 2015, 384 pp, €16.50.ISBN 978-960-14-2558-0.
Professor of international law and European economics at Pantheon University in Athens, Panagiotis Roumeliotisa was Greek trade and economics minister when PASOK was in power, and also, and more importantly, served as deputy managing director at the International Monetary Fund from March 2010 to December 2011. In this book, he provides an eye-witness account of what happened at the IMF during this critical period for Greece, giving an objective overview of the events that led Greece to the Memorandum. He argues that by accepting the conditions set by its European partners and the IMF, Greece largely agreed to its economy being sold off - and sold not only to its lenders. In order to avoid bankruptcies and remain within the eurozone, it was forced to accept the conditions of the first and second Memorandum that were vouched for by Greek journalists in the pay of the game-masters. The authors explains that in this way, the partners managed to set up a special 'neo-colonial' account to ensure that Greece's fiscal resources would be used first to pay back its lenders. Greece was in this way turned into a modern 'colony' of its lenders. It is therefore obliged to run an 'uphill marathon.' He concludes that the lenders should be warned that they should know that they if they continue to load the ship named Greece, they will sink it into the depths of human destruction and despair. Which would bring 'unpredictable consequences' in its train…
(AKa)
*** ANDREASANDIKOPOULOS, CHRISTOS NASTOPOULOS: La crise et le réalisme: l'action, les expériences et les structures en situation de crise en Grèce. Editions Propombos (53 rue Patission, GR-10433 Athens. Tel: (30-210) 5245264 - Fax: 5245246 - Email: propobos@propobos.gr - Internet: http://www.propobos.gr ). 2015,272 pp, €14.50. ISBN 978-618-5036-16-4.
The crisis arose from events, experiences by protagonists and the behaviour of the structures in question. In this book, two lecturers in business administration at the Aegean Sea University explain that this all combined to fine-tune the crisis that Greece is experiencing today, because the situation would have been different if the action and trajectories of its protagonists had been different, be it the political leaders, their European partners, the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund, the money markets or, in particular, citizens, whether Greeks or from other eurozone member states. Their action arose from the way they experienced the crisis and the responses that they made to avoid it, or prevent it from deteriorating. According to the authors, it is the sum of these actions and reactions that got the various mechanisms of the crisis running, the institutional problems and macroeconomic dead ends in Greece combined with the vulnerable unity of the eurozone leading the Greek economy into an unprecedented recession and the European Union into a phase of radical transformation, the final consequences of which cannot yet be gauged.
(AKa)
*** PERSEFONI TSALIKI, LEFTERIS TSOULFIDIS: Des essais de l'économie politique. Editions Tziola (91 rue Philippou, GR-54635 Thessalonica. Tel: (30-231) 0247887 - Fax: 0210712 - Email: info@tziola.gr - Internet: http://www.tziola.gr ). 2015, 415 pp, €28.11. ISBN 978-960-418-482-8.
In this book, two economists - one, Persefoni Tsaliki, lectures at the Aristotle University in Thessalonica, and the other, Lefteris Tsoulfidis, at Macedonia University - argue that the value (or depreciation) of an economic approach can be assessed by its capacity or incapacity to interpret phenomena such as prices, profit, national revenue, unemployment, money, interest rates and the like. Therefore, the authors highlight the mechanisms that govern the functioning of the capitalist economy at both the microeconomic level (price theory) and the macroeconomic level (income theory, expansion-reduction of the activity of production). The financial crisis that broke out in 2007 and which the Greeks are still suffering from today, came as a great surprise to neoclassical economists who had adopted the idea of an economic system that was fundamentally in good health and had been balanced since at least the middle of the 1980s. As Tsaliki and Tsoulfidis reveal, some economists admit with disarming honesty that they don't know how to manage the current situation, whereas others put forward unconvincing interpretations. The idea behind their essays is to contribute to understanding of the mechanisms that govern the functioning of the capitalist economy in the light of the broadest classical approach, and then to demonstrate the impact of various policies.
(AKa)
*** NIKOS CHRISTODOULAKIS: Les théories et les crises économiques. Un court récit. Editions Kritiki (4 rue Papadiamantolou, GR-11528 Athens. Tel: (30-210) 8211811 - Fax: 8211026 - Email: biblia@kritiki.gr - Internet: http://www.kritiki.gr ). 2015, 304 pp, €22. ISBN 978-960-218-924-5.
Why should anyone interested in contemporary issues take a detour through the history of economic theory? Simply because history is always useful for understanding the present, even though the circumstances are different. What policy did Ancient Greece use, for example, to avoid famine before it had technology or much in the way of technical knowledge? How did Ancient Rome manage the property crisis that it experienced? How was it possible for the monetary policy of Byzantium to remain in place for eight centuries? Why did the industrial revolution take place in England rather than France, which was much more powerful, or even in China, where the innovative technical discoveries of the time were taking place? Why, to take a case closer to home, were so many economists so slow to understand the crisis of 1929 and properly react to is? Why are planned economies doomed to failure? In this book, Nikos Christodoulakis, professor of economic analysis at Athens Business University and Greek finance minister in the PASOK government in 2001-2004, provides a critical analysis of the tempestuous relationship between economic theories and crises, from antiquity to the present day, describing the criteria by which they can be assessed and compared. He analyses in more detail the reasons for the dominant economic theory being shaken by the global crisis since 2008, and suggests various ways to avoid a repeat performance.
(AKa)
*** THEODOROS LIANOS, GEORGIOS BITROS: Les phénomènes économiques dans l'antiquité. Editions Gutemberg (37 rue Didotou, GR-10680 Athens. Tel: (30-210) 3642003 - Fax: 3642030 - Email: info@dardanosnet.gr). 2015, 103 pp, €7. ISBN 978-960-01-1689-2.
The first economic development programme in history was written by Xenophon in a very brief work entitled 'Ways and Means,' where he suggested ways of improving the economic health of the city of Athens. A key element of his programme was to make the most of the Lavrion silver mines to increase the amount of money available. Thus for the first time, a theory of money arose which can be seen as the start of the modern theory. In this book, two professors of economics at the University of Athens consider Xenophon as a precursor of Keynes. In Antiquity, money took the form of metal and was not able to cause financial crises. Much later, the abolition of the convertibility of paper currency into precious metal, however, opened the door to monetary crises because central banks proved unable to understand the exact situation of the economy. On the other hand, in periods of great uncertainty, they lost control of the quantity of currency to issue and also of suitable interest rates. Finally, the two authors explain, one way or another, banks are not independent of governments' policy considerations.
(AKa)
*** BARTOSZ KUZNIARZ: Farewell to Postmodernism. Social Theories of the Late Left. Peter Lang (1 Moosstrasse, P. O. Box 350, CH-2542 Pieterlen. Tel: (41-32) 3761717 - Fax: 3761727 - Email: info@peterlang.com - Internet: http://www.peterlang.com ). 'Modernity in Question - Studies in Philosophy, Sociology and History of Ideas' series, No. 7. 2015, 321 pp, €64.95. ISBN 978-3-631-62677-1.
Lecturer at the contemporary and social philosophy faculty at Bialystok University in Poland, Bartosz Kuzniarz devotes this book to the thinkers of Postmodernism who, from the end of the 1960s onwards, cast what they intended to be a radical eye on capitalism. He thus offers an encyclopaedic introduction to the work of artisans of the 'late left,' namely Fredric Jameson and his 'Postmodernism, or, the Cultural logic of Late Capitalism' (1991), David Harvey and 'The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change' (1992), Terry Eagleton and 'The Illusions of Postmodernism' (1996) and Perry Anderson and 'The Origins of Postmodernity.' He also looks at Slovenian author Slavoj Zizek who, along his own path, worked in the same spirit that ended up pairing up with new utopias in order to escape from the present shackles.
(PBo)