Europe

Krugman:

I would put it a bit differently: financial crises call into question whether respectable people know what they’re doing, in a way that other kinds of economic shocks often don’t.

The point for Europe is that the doctrinaire policies followed since 2010, and the unwillingness to rethink dogma in the light of experience, aren’t just economically destructive. They undermine the legitimacy of the whole European system, and may in the end lead to political catastrophe.

IMF Chief Christine Lagarde Sees Greece 'Reaping Benefits' of Austerity:

What technical analysis and the history of crisis management tells us, is that you're better off doing it [deficit reduction] strong and hard at the beginning in order to reap the benefits of the process

I watched both parts of the extremely compelling documentary, "Apocalypse: The Rise of Hitler" [h/t Yves Smith]

Martin Wolf:

It is often forgotten, not least in Germany, that the rise of Adolf Hitler to power was preceded not by the great inflation, which occurred a decade before, but by the great depression and the austerity of Heinrich Brüning, in response. Thus, votes for the Nazi party jumped from a relatively insignificant 810,000 in 1928, to 6.4m in 1930, and 13.7m in July 1932. Deep economic collapses are dangerous.

John Psaropoulos on the effects of austerity on the Greek political terrain: