Five years of crisis sully politicians' image

Five years after the outbreak of the international financial crisis the politicians still haven't got the situation under control, the conservative daily ABC writes, recalling August 9, 2007, the day the crisis began with the announcement that the French bank BNP Paribas was in trouble: "Hardly anyone, not to say no one, thought back then that the most serious economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s was about to begin. … At a political level the crisis has brought down governments of all stripes on both sides of the Atlantic, including the Republicans in the US, Berlusconi in Italy and Zapatero in Spain. That five years on the crisis still hasn't been overcome testifies to the incompetence of most Western governments - who are completely at odds with each other over whether economic stimulus or austerity packages will bring recovery. However some have been more successful than others. The US solved its banking problems at lightning speed and Germany is sticking to its austerity policy despite the recession, while the Spanish Socialists simply denied the crisis."

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More from the press review on the subject » Fiscal Policy, » Economic Policy, » Banks, » Germany, » Spain, » U.S., » Global
Who's saying what » Ways out of the debt crisis, » Spain in the banking crisis

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