United States and the European Union "are using the same recipe that the IMF applied on Argentina" to address the current global financial crisis and this only leads to "stagnation" said Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz attending a gathering of Nobel Prize recipients and young economists in Lindau, Germany.

The most dangerous myth, and one repeated daily in much of the major media, is that these troubles on both sides of the Atlantic are a result of a "debt crisis", and can only be resolved through fiscal tightening. The United States is not facing any public debt crisis at all, with interest payments on the debt at just 1.4% of GDP. Some eurozone countries do have a "debt crisis" - for example, Greece. But this is only because the European authorities have failed to take the necessary steps to resolve it, and have, instead, made it worse by shrinking the economy. In other words, there is no legitimate economic reason for a sovereign debt burden - even an unsustainable one - to result in years of economic stagnation and high unemployment. If the debt needs to be restructured because it is not payable, as in Greece, then that should be done as quickly as possible and with enough debt cancellation to make the resulting debt burden sustainable - as Argentina did with its successful default in 2001.

The blazing infernos which took hold in the UK's biggest cities have shocked British society. It wasn't a desire to protest that drove the brutal looters onto the streets, but pure consumer greed. Bankers, politicians and media moguls have made this greed socially acceptable. Education grants for children from low-income families - abolished. Also abolished in many areas were youth centers and help centers for the unemployed and pregnant. In the Lewisham area alone, five libraries were closed. What happens next? Where does it end? What is the limit? There is none. In the London borough of Haringey, which includes Tottenham, 75 percent of funding for youth services will be cut over the next three years. This miserable life of drugs, loitering and weapons in neighborhoods which were devastated by the policies of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s and never fixed by Tony Blair or Gordon Brown, is the fate of those dubbed "NEETs" in the UK. It stands for "not in education, employment or training", and there are about 1.2 million people who fit the description. They rule their local areas under the law of the jungle, with a deep sense of uselessness in a world where almost every recreational activity costs money; money which they don't have.

Os conservadores lançaram um ataque brutal às pessoas desempregadas para desviar as críticas dos verdadeiros parasitas: os ricos. Na semana passada, o governo anunciou que os desempregados que solicitam auxílio deverão realizar trabalhos não remunerados: caso se neguem a fazê-lo, perderão o subsídio. Os chefes e a imprensa da direita estão encantados. O Daily Mail anunciou com alegria: "Em uma nova ofensiva contra os parasitas sociais, os desempregados irresponsáveis terão que participar de um programa de trabalho exigente, estilo EUA, que incluirá a obrigação de realizar trabalhos de jardinagem, limpeza de lixo e outras tarefas manuais por apenas 1 libra a hora".

Chinese rating agency Dagong Global Credit Rating Co. said Wednesday it has cut the credit rating of the United States from A+ to A with a negative outlook after the U.S. federal government announced that the country's debt limit would be increased.

US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said he is not sure whether the bitterly fought debt agreement to be considered by the US Senate will avoid a downgrade of the U.S. top-tier credit rating.

The EU is not lending money to Ireland, Greece, and Portugal to help those nations' citizens. The EU is lending those nations money because if they don't those nations and their citizens and corporations will be unable to repay their debts to banks in the core. That will make public the fact that the core banks are actually insolvent. When the Germans and French realize that their banks are insolvent the result will be "severe banking crises and a return to recession in the core of the eurozone." The core, not simply the periphery, will be in crisis. The ECB and the EU's leadership would be happy to throw the periphery under the bus, but the EU core's largest banks are chained to the periphery by their imprudent loans.

A vividly told history of how greed bred America's economic ills over the last forty years, and of the men most responsible for them. As Jeff Madrick makes clear in a narrative at once sweeping, fast-paced, and incisive, the single-minded pursuit of huge personal wealth has been on the rise in the United States since the 1970s, led by a few individuals who have argued that self-interest guides society more effectively than community concerns. These stewards of American capitalism have insisted on the central and essential place of accumulated wealth through the booms, busts, and recessions of the last half century, giving rise to our current woes. In telling the stories of these politicians, economists, and financiers who declared a moral battle for freedom but instead gave rise to an age of greed, Madrick traces the lineage of some of our nation's most pressing economic problems. He begins with Walter Wriston, head of what would become Citicorp, who led the battle against government regulation. He examines the ideas of economist Milton Friedman, who created the plan for an anti-Rooseveltian America; the politically expedient decisions of Richard Nixon that fueled inflation; the philosophy of Alan Greenspan, on whose libertarian ideology a house of cards was built on Wall Street. Intense economic inequity and instability is the story of our age, and Jeff Madrick tells it with style, clarity, and an unerring command of his subject.

Greece faces unacceptable conditions for a new bailout. If it defaults, the US had better be ready for the economic shock. The European authorities are playing a dangerous game of "chicken" with Greece right now. It is overdue for US members of Congress to exercise some oversight as to what our government's role is in this process, and how we might be preparing for a Greek debt default. Depending on how it happens, this default could have serious repercussions for the international financial system, the US economy and, indeed, the world economy.

In years past, when financial crises in Argentina and Russia left those countries unable to make good on their government debts, they simply defaulted. But this time around, swaps and other sorts of contracts have become so common and so intertwined in the financial markets that there are fears among regulators and financial players about how a Greek default would play out among derivatives holders. No one seems to be sure, in large part because the world of derivatives is so murky. But the possibility that some company out there may have insured billions of dollars of European debt has added a new tension to the sovereign default debate.

Former managing director of the IMF, Michel Camdessus admitted Thursday in Buenos Aires that during his time working for the organization, they 'made many mistakes with Argentina,' particularly highlighting the 90s. With regard to the topic, the former IMF managing director estimated that "80% of the global economic growth," over the course of the next forty years, "will come from the development of emerging countries, like Argentina," also considering that during this time the dollar will cease to dominate the monetary system and global finance. Camdessus acknowledged that "current neo-liberalism is extremely short regarding institutions and regulations".

Despite the financing challenges, Argentina's economy has grown by more than 8 percent a year since 2003, and many industries have benefited from the devaluation. Argentina has resumed exporting cars to Brazil. Tourism has flourished from an influx of Brazilians and other foreigners. In the end, Argentina may have one more lesson to teach Greece: the danger of fatalism. "A lot of people were saying that Argentina would never recover, that the peso would never regain value, that this country was damned," said Mr. Kerner, the analyst. "And it didn't happen."

The European Union is in bad shape. Not only is the common currency in a shambles and the economies of many member states moribund, but young Europeans no longer see how the EU helps them. Millions of them are taking to the streets to demand a future.

European banks have hog-tied their governments, replacing Parliamentary democracy with dictatorship by the ECB, which is blocked constitutionally from creating credit for governments - until German and French banks found it in their own interest for it to do so.

A conversão massiva ao mercado e a globalização neoliberal, a renúncia à defesa dos pobres, do Estado de bem estar e do setor público, a nova aliança com o capital financeiro, despojaram a social-democracia europeia dos principais traços de sua identidade. A cada dia fica mais difícil para os cidadãos distinguir entre uma política de direita e outra "de esquerda", já que ambas respondem às exigências dos senhores financeiros do mundo. Por acaso, a suprema astúcia destes não consistiu em colocar a um "socialista" na direção do FMI com a missão de impor a seus amigos "socialistas" da Grécia, Portugal e Espanha os implacáveis planos de ajuste neoliberal? O artigo é de Ignacio Ramonet.

The euro is becoming an ever greater threat to Europe's common future. The currency union chains together economies that are simply incompatible. Politicians approve one bailout package after the other and, in doing so, have set down a dangerous path that could burden Europeans for generations to come and set the EU back by decades.

It is not democracy that keeps western nations at war, but armies and the interests now massed behind them. The greatest speech about modern defence was made in 1961 by the US president Eisenhower. He was no leftwinger, but a former general and conservative Republican. Looking back over his time in office, his farewell message to America was a simple warning against the "disastrous rise of misplaced power" of a military-industrial complex with "unwarranted influence on government". A burgeoning defence establishment, backed by large corporate interests, would one day employ so many people as to corrupt the political system. (His original draft even referred to a "military-industrial-congressional complex".) This lobby, said Eisenhower, could become so huge as to "endanger our liberties and democratic processes".

Maintaining ignorance about the limitations of stability theory comes in handy when perpetuating the mythology of market theory. As Mundell once remarked, stability analysis is the most successful failure of general economic theory. It is also the best example of how an academic community pushes the most serious problems of mainstream theory under the rug and gets away with it. Students should learn to look under the rug. The ability to improve our understanding of economic processes depends on efforts to uncover the failures of mainstream theoretical constructs.

All across the United States, large and small cities are closing public libraries or curtailing their hours of operations. Detroit, I read a few days ago, may close all of its branches and Denver half of its own: decisions that will undoubtedly put hundreds of its employees out of work. When you count the families all over this country who don't have computers or can't afford Internet connections and rely on the ones in libraries to look for jobs, the consequences will be even more dire. People everywhere are unhappy about these closings, and so are mayors making the hard decisions. But with roads and streets left in disrepair, teachers, policemen and firemen being laid off, and politicians in both parties pledging never to raise taxes, no matter what happens to our quality of life, the outlook is bleak. "The greatest nation on earth," as we still call ourselves, no longer has the political will to arrest its visible and precipitous decline and save the institutions on which the workings of our democracy depend.

This is a new blog.

Fissures among Europe's currency partners are becoming even deeper and more widespread than was previously evident, raising new doubts about whether the group can resolve the regional debt crisis that has simmered for more than a year.