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Greeks March as Spain Misses Growth Targets

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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More bad news from Europe. Spain’s Employment Minister Valeriano Gomez told CNBC that a slow economy almost certainly will cause his country to miss growth targets. About the same time he was interviewed, huge strikes broke out in Greece that shuttered the country’s air traffic, some of its tax offices, schools and ground transportation. Side-by-side, these news items are a microcosm of what is wrong with Europe and why it will not get better.

Greece’s citizens have shown a willingness to destroy their own economy in the name of retaining high wages and excellent benefits. It cannot be lost on them that this is a huge gamble. They do not seem to care. Perhaps they believe that the EU will bail out their country to protect the region’s interests. Or perhaps they believe that a default will not drive their economy into a depression and deprive them of their livelihoods altogether.

Spain’s lament about its budget and GDP are almost identical to comments made by Greece. Similar problems most likely will plague Italy and almost certainly Portugal. Any hope that an even modest GDP expansion in the EU would underpin the rescue of weak countries has disappeared in the past few weeks as it has become nearly certain that the region has already entered a recession.

Labor strikes will spread from Greece to other austerity-prone countries. There have already been some in Spain. It is hard to see the logic of people who would damage their own economies. The subject of austerity has become an emotional one more than anything else.

Douglas A. McIntyre

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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