VIDEO: Buy, Buy Europe, Part 1: A Bank Crisis a Week

Or, How European Banks Hijacked the Euro Monetary Union, by Stuart Jeanne Bramhall, Film Review

Buy, Buy Europe by Peter De Vos (2013) is a five-part miniseries describing how European banks have hijacked the euro monetary union to vastly increase their wealth. The upcoming Brexit vote in Britain makes this a particularly relevant topic.

The series begins by describing the history of the European monetary union. Built at the height of neoliberalism it adopted all the rhetoric of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Alan Greenspan promising that globalized capitalism and free markets would end economic crises, increase prosperity and end inequality.

What really happened is that creating the euro massively increased inequality between northern and southern Europe and between workers and the super rich.
In seeking to make European banks as strong and competitive as US and British banks, Eurozone leaders ceased regulating them. Wall Street is often blamed for the EU’s 2008 meltdown. In actuality, deregulated European banks were equally guilty of risky speculation in derivatives and subprime mortgages.
Following the 2008 economic crash, European banks required massive government bailouts to keep European economies from collapsing. Promised banking reforms to prevent a recurrence of 2008 never happened. And according to the IMF, the global banking system is even more unstable today as it was right before the meltdown.

Dr. Stuart Jeanne Bramhall is a retired child psychiatrist, activist, author, blogger, and journalist.   She is the author of The Most Revolutionary Act: Memoir of an American Refugee (e-book, soft cover), 21st Century Revolution, a collection of political essays, and two young adult novels, The Battle for Tomorrow (e-book, soft cover) and A Rebel Comes of Age.

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