Word: european
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After a decade of overspending, Greece has fallen into a debt crisis. The country--which along with Portugal, Ireland, Italy and Spain is a member of the so-called PIIGS group of troubled European economies--is carrying a deficit close to 13% of GDP, more than four times the E.U. limit. Part of the blame for Greece's economic woes has been placed on padded public-sector wages and rampant tax evasion. Proposed austerity measures, which include a pay freeze for government employees, prompted thousands to go on strike. European leaders, who fear that Greece's troubles will trigger widespread...
...reality was more complicated. Greece now had a solid currency--but it wasn't Greece's currency. The euro was managed by monetary wonks at the European Central Bank in Frankfurt for whom the Greek economy was but a blip. And the decision makers in Athens with responsibility for fiscal policy continued to blunder. The country kept running big deficits in the boom years. Then came the Great Recession. Last fall, a new government revealed that the 2009 budget deficit was much higher than previously disclosed--nearly 13% of GDP. Ever since, the world's financial markets have been going...
...would be a disaster for Greece and for the global financial system. As for No. 4, given that there are no procedures for leaving the euro, it might risk unraveling the entire project. In the euro's prelaunch period, a few skeptics predicted that the mismatch between a single European currency and differing national economic conditions would eventually lead to tension and an ugly breakup. The euro, heretofore one of the great political and economic successes of the past decade, is now undergoing a stress test of that hypothesis...
...that a new study by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in Washington has re-estimated the earthquake damage from $5 billion to between $7 billion and $13 billion, making it one of history's worst natural disasters. "This has never happened to a country before," says the European-educated Bellerive, 51, a doctor's son and international-relations expert. "Forty percent of our GDP was destroyed in 30 seconds." (See TIME's exclusive photos of the Haiti earthquake destruction...
Perhaps the biggest message from the vote is that European governments will now have to adapt to working with an increasingly emboldened Parliament. Thomas Klau, who heads the Paris office of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), says that while Parliament members were sincere in their concerns over civil liberties, some were perhaps also a little over-excited to exercise their new authority. "The institutional landscape has changed," he says. "This is an early affirmation of the European Parliament's increased powers and self-confidence in the wake of the Lisbon Treaty. And it now has political ambition...