Setting Greece’s SYRIZA Straight, the New York Times Gets it Wrong on Debt

‘Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis–an economics professor who has taught at Cambridge and the universities of Athens, Sydney and Texas–may understand the Greek debt crisis even better than New York Times reporters.

As corporate media prepared to caricature the new Greek government led by the anti-austerity SYRIZA party as dangerously naive radicals, the New York Times(1/29/15) published a piece by Liz Alderman with a devious suggestion that SYRIZA Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis does not understand the basic debt dynamics of his own country. She then followed up with her own erroneous definition of a fiscal “primary surplus,” a crucial accounting concept for the Greek debt work-out.’

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