Dijsselbloem is a bad economist

Dijsselbloem is a bad economist. He is saying these days, after the Tsipras government has agreed to a package of policies it does not believe in, in numerous interviews in the Dutch media, that the "reforms" his Eurogroup is prescribing to Tsipras will be to the benefit of the Greek people.

Dijsselbloem is like a doctor prescribing a bitter medicine to a patient saying: "This will cure your disease."

But prescribing a medical treatment is different from prescribing political econmic "reforms". In the first you may believe (or not), in the second you should not believe unless you agree with it and history has shown there is reason to believe in it. In the Greek referendum 61 percent of the people have said they did not believe in the Eurogroup's medicine.    

Over the past five years we have seen that the Eurogroup medicine did not solve Greece's debt and growth problems. Therefore, Dijsselbloem should have known better.

Moreover, over the past five months his colleague Varoufakis has explained that the Eurogroup medicine would not work and that there is a better medicine. If he had been a good economist, Dijsselbloem would have listened carefully to the arguments of the new Greek government and explained why he did not believe in Varoufakis/Tsipras' plans and preferred to stick to the Eurogroup's Diktat.

In revising this post, I hesitated whether I should call the Eurogroup's medicine a Diktat, but former managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn has no problem in using that term, I read this Sunday morning in Le Figaro: DSK dénonce le diktat que l'Europe a imposé à la Grèce.