I used to like Angela Merkel, but then I just read the following:
For example, when the Greek crisis erupted, German chancellor Angela Merkel criticized the inclusion of Greece in the eurozone. “We can’t have a common currency when some people get a lot of vacation time and others very little,” she said (Economist 2011), in a clear reference to the countries of southern Europe.
Guillén, Arturo. “Europe: A Crisis Within a Crisis.” International Journal of Political Economy 41.3 (Fall 2012): 41–68.
She is either a complete idiot or a rank hypocrite. What’s your guess?
Clarissa's Blog 
She’s a christian conservative coming from a christian conservative party, what do you expect…
That statement was part of several political acts that implied that if greece would just be a little bit like they believe Germany to be (hardworking and all that shit), all would be well.
A typical reaction for the CDU/CSU if you ask me. They like to hole up in rich and conservative strongholds like munich and yell at everybody else that they are doing fine and all everyone else has to do is being just a bit more like them. Which usually means being well off and not an immigrant.
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Have you written about the reasons and proposed solutions to the crisis? Don’t know anything about it.
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I’m reading a lot on the crisis these days, and there seems to be a consensus among economists that the roots of the economic crisis of 2007-9 lie in the global economic crisis of the 1970s. In response to that crisis, the productive economy was dismantled and replaced by the economy of the bubble. Things weren’t about how well you could make goods but about how well you could sell air. And all bubbles have a tendency to burst, which is what happened in 2007. Fascinating stuff.
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— the productive economy was dismantled and replaced by the economy of the bubble.
If you believe this is the case (and I agree), and take into account that Germany preserved (relatively) a lot of export-oriented productive economy, then maybe Germany (as a whole, not just socially conservative factions) was doing something right…
Attributing the failures of Greece to longer vacation is of course a ridiculous populist oversimplification… But let’s not fall into other extreme and attribute failures of Greece to some mystical forces completely out of control of the Greeks.
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I’m better familiar with Spain than with Greece and what happened in Spain is that it dismantled its entire productive economy to be admitted to the EU. It was so crucial to gain the label of Europeans and contradict the saying that “Africa begins in the Pyrenees” that the entire economy was canned to serve that goal. Now let anybody claim that economic reasons are stronger motivators than ideology.
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And now Ukraine is going to go down the same road as Spain for the same idiotic reasons. On the positive side, there is no economy to be dismantled in Ukraine.
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“Africa begins at the Pyrenees” would have been okay in the 1970s or 1980s. But, we here in Africa or at least Ghana are now doing a lot better than Greece. We will probably do better than Spain soon as well. Every time the salary of lecturers in a European country dips below mine I feel a great deal of Schadenfreude.
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Merkel’s comment is not all that wrong:
If you have a common currency then you should also have other things in common because the system would not be balanced otherwise. For example: is it fair that Germans get to retire at the age of 67 while the retirement age in many of the European crisis states is somewhere around 60? In other words: the Germans are working longer to pay the Greek debt. This doesn’t mean that the Greek are lazy. They had just decided at some point that they think 60 is a good age for retirement and if they would have had their own currency they could have taken measures (e.g. devaluing the currency) to make sure their system is in balance.
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Dude, maybe you should read a newspaper or something. This is just embarrassing.
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You’ll be further disappointed to hear that the chancellor was involved in a skiing accident.
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