For the beleaguered small countries of Europe, the euro crisis has become a form of torture, a death by a thousand cuts.
The Portuguese government stumbles on but was weakened by the resignation of the finance minister and the foreign minister.
The former admitted that he had underestimated how deeply his spending cuts would bite into overall economic output and therefore of tax revenues. The latter leads one of the parties in the governing coalition and in his departing speech said that the austerity imposed by Portugal's eurozone partners couldn't go on.
The next tranche of Greece's bailout money has been held up because the Greek government wasn't meeting its pledges to cut the number of state employees and to privatize state assets.
Ironically, some of the same European governments that insist on the cuts were also those that complained when the government announced the closure of its state broadcasting service to save money. Greece's Supreme Court then said the government had no powers to close it, which simply makes the funding gap all the wider.
The Irish economy is back in recession after a brief period of hope. New car registrations in May were down 11 percent on the previous year and the bad loans ratio is 25 percent, the same as in Greece.
The release of tape recordings of Irish bankers, boasting to each other of the way they had tricked the government into bailing them out, has soured the public mood, already depressed after five years of crisis.
The country's budget deficit this year looks to be 7.5 percent of gross domestic product, the worst in the European Union, and public debt is forecast to reach 123 percent of GDP by the end of the year.
This level of debt is dismaying since interest rates are creeping up, after the Federal Reserve in the United States hinted that the days of cheap money could be drawing to a close, with its monthly bond purchases under review.
Read more: http://www.upi.com/Top_News/Analysis/Walker/2013/07/08/Walkers-World-Euro-crisis-returns/UPI-80171373256120/
The Portuguese government stumbles on but was weakened by the resignation of the finance minister and the foreign minister.
The former admitted that he had underestimated how deeply his spending cuts would bite into overall economic output and therefore of tax revenues. The latter leads one of the parties in the governing coalition and in his departing speech said that the austerity imposed by Portugal's eurozone partners couldn't go on.
The next tranche of Greece's bailout money has been held up because the Greek government wasn't meeting its pledges to cut the number of state employees and to privatize state assets.
Ironically, some of the same European governments that insist on the cuts were also those that complained when the government announced the closure of its state broadcasting service to save money. Greece's Supreme Court then said the government had no powers to close it, which simply makes the funding gap all the wider.
The Irish economy is back in recession after a brief period of hope. New car registrations in May were down 11 percent on the previous year and the bad loans ratio is 25 percent, the same as in Greece.
The release of tape recordings of Irish bankers, boasting to each other of the way they had tricked the government into bailing them out, has soured the public mood, already depressed after five years of crisis.
The country's budget deficit this year looks to be 7.5 percent of gross domestic product, the worst in the European Union, and public debt is forecast to reach 123 percent of GDP by the end of the year.
This level of debt is dismaying since interest rates are creeping up, after the Federal Reserve in the United States hinted that the days of cheap money could be drawing to a close, with its monthly bond purchases under review.
Read more: http://www.upi.com/Top_News/Analysis/Walker/2013/07/08/Walkers-World-Euro-crisis-returns/UPI-80171373256120/