Europe Is Saving the Financial Markets, But Not Coronavirus Victims
After the 2008 crisis, European authorities saved the banks but forced welfare states to slash spending. Faced with the coronavirus, austerity-hit hospital services are under siege — yet the European Central Bank is again helping out the financial markets, not public health care systems.
The European Central Bank in Frankfurt, Germany. (Thomas Hassel / Flickr)
On Thursday, March 12, the coronavirus outbreak in Europe reached a fresh milestone, with the one-thousandth death in Italy — today the country with the most new cases. This is the latest indicator of the depth of the crisis, which has also brought a far-reaching shutdown of the Italian economy. This is anything but a purely domestic issue — and other European states look to be headed in the same direction.
In a press release on Tuesday, focused on the economic fallout of the crisis, the European Commission noted in dry bureaucratese that “Coronavirus has a very significant human dimension.” Yet as Martine Orange writes for Mediapart, European authorities have narrowly focused on steadying the financial markets — while doing nothing to show that “European solidarity” extends to the population itself.
The ECB Has the Wrong Priorities
A lot of generals have the habit of refighting the last war. And faced with the coronavirus, political and monetary authorities give the impression that they’re falling into the same trap. In their minds, they’re dealing with a financial crisis comparable to 2008, when what we’re really going through is an unprecedented public health crisis, hitting the heart of the real economy. And neither public health nor the real economy needs the same responses as the markets do.
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