Greece and Italy can’t blame Brussels for structural demographics and no industry worth young people sticking around for though, right? If your country is just a runner up economically, you didn’t have much leverage to begin with. With monetary policy control, you can print, but without the underlying economic engine to back that printing, you end up as Turkey (bad) or Venezuela (worse). Only in aggregate can you monetize the debt.
> Greece and Italy can’t blame Brussels for structural demographics and no industry worth young people sticking around for though
Greece and Italy choose to be part of the EUR, so now they have to pay the price of a choice they made. However, there is a structural problem with the way the common currency is constructed. This has little to do with individual countries and everything to do with the eurozone.
The EURO created a union with a common central bank that lacked a common state to have its back, while simultaneously allowing states to carry on without a central bank to have their backs in times of financial crisis, when states must bail out the banks operating in their territory.
Now during the good times, cross-border loans created unsustainable debts. Then, at the first sign of financial distress (either a public or a private debt crisis), the writing was on the wall: a eurozone-wide spasm whose inevitable outcome was sharp divergence and enormous new imbalances.
The beneficiaries of this situation are some countries and not others, but this is not sustainable in the long run. The EU needs to create a proper banking union and then most likely most to a sort of political integration. Unfortunately the EURO as currently constructed, made that impossible by pitting one country against another.
