Troika Technical Manual: How to wreck (another) country?
Cyprus is a small country of some 839 thousand people. It joined the Eurozone on January 1, 2008. That decision sealed its fate. Now the Troika are making it pay for that mistake, one that the Troika lured it into making. Such is the way of the Eurozone. The elites set the system up to suit their ideological preferences. Lure the local national elites who aspire to wine and dine in style in Brussels into becoming pro-Euro. Then attack the ordinary folks when the system collapses. But as we know, the Eurozone was a system designed to fail as soon as the first major negative aggregate demand shock hit. The shock hit in 2008. The system failed. Since then the elites have been divining ways to push the costs of those mistakes onto those who are least able to pay. How many Euro decision-makers are unemployed as a result of the crisis? How many Euro decision-makers who have since retired have lost any pension entitlements? But now the citizens of Cyprus are having their savings plundered by the Troika. The shamelessness seems to have no bounds. It is not even a strategy that will deliver the outcomes they have defined. The elites go from one blunder to the next and meanwhile all the key economic targets continue to deteriorate (like employment growth etc). And even the irrelevant targets that are the obsession of the elites also move in the opposite direction to that intended. If it wasn’t so tragic it would be the comedy of the century.