Abstract
The author presents various explanatory modalities to be found among scholars’ accounts of the Spanish crisis that support the vision of the crisis as a possibility. The revision of the literature led him to establish a classification in which three characteristics stand out. On the one hand, many explanations do not identify the causal factors. On the other, it is noted that they are limited to a descriptive list of the set of accumulated imbalances during the period of economic growth. Besides, the author shows that a large part of orthodox diagnoses of the crisis focus on the decisions, incentives and subjective issues associated with agents and economic policy. Finally, the chapter addresses the guidelines of economic policy in Spain and the implications of the European Central Bank intervention during the crisis.
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Notes
- 1.
A question does arise, will it be that in the current academic world there are material incentives to favor this type of economic theories of the crisis? If one tries to understand the explanatory incapacity of orthodox economics, perhaps its functionality to defend certain interests could result from some kind of incentive, other than mere love for knowledge.
- 2.
Behind this name, Jorge Juan, there is a group of economists who defend the neoclassical approach. Jorge Juan was a Spanish scientist who gave his name to the street where the FEDEA headquarters are located. FEDEA is an institution of studies on applied economics (https://www.fedea.net/), a “think tank” of economic orthodoxy, and well financed by the main large corporations in Spain. These authors have a blog http://nadaesgratis.es/ about their famous book, which on the other hand is very interesting, although from opposite theoretical positions.
- 3.
This author is very critical of the ECB’s connection with German interests, and points out that “the crisis has shown that the ECB and Draghi can only act respecting the red lines set by Germany. Given the already unequivocal deflation in the Euro zone, the current quantitative expansion of the ECB, which is strongly depreciating the euro, mainly favors European countries that export outside the EU; that is, Germany” (Comín 2015: 48).
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Mateo Tomé, J.P. (2019). This Time It Was Also the Same: Accumulation of Imbalances and Human Failures. In: The Theory of Crisis and the Great Recession in Spain . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27084-1_8
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