In his memoirs, “A Promised Land,” former Us President Barack Obama makes also some reference to the Greek debt crisis and the way in which the major European powers chose to deal with the situation. In his memoir that was released on Tuesday, Obama writes:
“I noticed that they rarely mentioned that German and French banks were some of Greece’s biggest lenders, or that much of Greeks’ accumulated debt had been racked up buying German and French exports – facts that might have made clear to voters why saving the Greeks from default amounted to saving their own banks and industries.”
Referring to German and French calls for austerity, Obama notes: “Maybe they worried that such an admission would turn voter attention away from failures of successive Greek governments and toward the failures of those German or French officials charged with supervising bank lending practices.”
The former US president had also during his tenure criticized Berlin as well as Paris for their insistence on fiscal austerity (particularly in the early stages of the crisis), at a time when all indications pointed to the need of implementing an expansionary policy.
