The 2008 crisis has caused Europe's poor to increase by 75% in number. 43 million in Europe cannot eat their fill every day. The increasing poverty is not only due to the disaster itself, but to the fact that it has been exploited by right-wing politicians to pursue neoliberal austerity policies, e.g. in Greece and Italy. According to the right-wing economist Milton Friedman, disasters were golden opportunities to reform society in a more neoliberal/bourgeois/inequal/unjust direction. This has probably worsened the crisis because when the low-income population has less to move around with, they consume less and companies go bankrupt and lay off employees and the public sector also gets austerity measures. The vicious circle is closed.
Left blog
