sovereignty

For ideological reasons, one might believe that limiting or reducing government is better. However, it does not follow that doing so is a painless exercise.

Evangelos Venizelos is dispatched to consider how to prevent the government from sacking tens of thousands of workers in order to prevent the Greek from defaulting on its debt. He suggests that California’s previous IOU issuance is a model…

The following is an outline for a proposed new Greek government bond issue to provide all required medium term euro funding for Greece on very attractive terms. The new bond issue includes an addition to the default provisions that…

Short of a fiscal union, there are other measures which the Greeks could adopt to make their bonds more attractive to external investors, thereby preventing the markets shutting the country down and refusing to extend further credit to a…

Slovenia’s problems highlights the fundamental deflationary bias of the euro system and all fixed exchange rate systems more generally.

Only a referendum can commit the Greek government to repay new debts imposed under austerity. Only a referendum can prevent property that is privatized from being re-nationalized. Such a transfer is not legitimate under commonly accepted…

William Black writes that the non-payment of debt – including bank debt – by the nations on the periphery would lead to severe banking crises and a return to recession in the core of eurozone. This is what is behind the stance of the ECB,…

The primary difference for Euroland to sovereign issuers is that the Euro can only be created by the ECB – it is the issuer of the currency. The governments of Ireland, Greece, Spain, Germany, etc. are the USERS of the currency. The…

I ran across a post by Robert Murphy over at the Mises Institute blog on Modern Monetary Theory. Since I have been pushing the idea that the centrality of secular debt accumulation makes some ideas from MMT and Austrian Economics…

Given S&P's decision to downgrade the U.S. credit rating to outlook negative, it bears remembering how we got here. I think the key word is deleveraging.