Can Europe escape the debt trap? Yes – and here's how

Πηγή: Guardian (4/5/2011)

• by Costas Lapavitsas and Andy Storey
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Today activists in Ireland are following Greece's example by launching a public audit of the country's debt to establish its legitimacy

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• Financial markets have successfully demanded the imposition of severe austerity on the periphery of the eurozone – Greece, Ireland and Portugal – to deal with public debt. The markets have also raised concerns about it in the United States, Britain and Japan, clamouring for austerity. Public debt seems to operate like a mask behind which lies a shadowy world of creditors to whose upkeep entire economies are mortgaged.

Can that mask be lifted? It has been in other countries, through the mechanism of a debt audit. Initiatives like this have happened in Brazil, Ecuador and elsewhere in order to untangle the web of secrecy around the debt and work out who lent what to whom, when and for what purpose. Typically, there is an expectation that some, at least, of the debt, will be found to be "illegitimate", and can therefore be repudiated.