Free Republic

Greece's pleas to stop the "fiscal waterboarding" of its devastated economy are substantively no different from President Obama's repeated warnings to Germany to stop bleeding the euro area economy with excessive fiscal austerity. Sadly, the president's reportedly more than a dozen phone calls to the German Chancellor Merkel in 2011 and 2012 urging supportive economic policies in the euro area fell on deaf ears. These calls were not just brushed aside; they were plainly ridiculed as Chancellor Merkel kept telling the media that "it made no sense to be adding new debt to old debt." But -- worrying about one-fifth...

End 'Gross Indignity', Greek FM Varoufakis Tells Germany Yanis Varoufakis is in Berlin attempting to renegotiate Greece's debt Greece's new finance minister has urged Germany to help end the "gross indignity" of the Greek debt crisis. Yanis Varoufakis said "too much time, hopes, lives" had been wasted by Greece's forced austerity programme. He was speaking after talks with his German counterpart, Wolfgang Schaeuble, who said a reduction of Greece's debt was off the agenda. Mr Varoufakis has been seeking support for Greece's plan to renegotiate its massive international bailout. On Thursday evening, thousands of people gathered in front of the...

In a not-so-subtle rebuke of President Obama’s tendency to offer unsolicited recommendations on how Europeans should handle their debt crises on Sunday evening, Germany’s finance minister suggested that perhaps His Munificence should focus on his own problems before trying to fix everybody else’s. Wolfgang Schaeuble told public broadcaster ZDF in an interview late Sunday that “people are always very quick at giving others advice.”He says: “Mr. Obama should first of all take care of reducing the American deficit, which is higher than in the eurozone.” An unfortunate and embarrassing truth — the EU’s debt-to-GDP ratio is well over eighty percent,...