The Eurozone crisis was private, not public, debt

Evidence

Take Ireland and Spain together and you do not have a story of profligate states, feckless workers, and all the rest. Certainly, the Spanish regional governments have a few white elephant projects that have worsened the situation, airports that have no traffic, massive opera houses with no customers, and the like; but these are symptoms, not causes. Indeed, in the Basque country, where there was more political control of the cajas, investment in property was not allowed to the same extent and the result was investment in manufacturing. The underlying crisis is, once again, one of private, not public, finance. — Mark Blyth, Austerity, 190

From the start the euro was a banking crisis waiting to happen. One trigger for the crisis was Greece and the discovery that the PIIGS were pushing up yields, as detailed earlier. The other trigger was a series of events that happened, just as we saw in the United States in 2008, deep within the banking system itself and that centered upon the use of government bonds as repo collateral for funding banks. Once again, what is portrayed as a public-sector crisis is, at its core, an almost entirely private-sector (banking) problem. — Mark Blyth, Austerity, 232

Categorization

• XREF: Core thesis connecting to Mattei and the whole austerity-debunking canon: austerity was misprescribed for a private-debt crisis. — connects to: Sweden’s 1989-1993 collapse came from asset bubbles and currency crisis, not debt fears — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 573; The European debt crisis resulted from banking losses, not sovereign overspending — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 40; The 2008 crisis was generated by the private sector but paid for publicly — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 75 (+11 more)
• SEED: A strong essay angle: how public narratives of ‘profligate governments’ overwrote a crisis generated inside private banking’s repo circuits, in both the US and eurozone simultaneously.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 190; Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 232

Broader Connections

• European fiscal crises were consequences of private banking crises, not their cause #corroborates (0.95) — Mark Blyth, Austerity, 205
• European banking crisis was mostly private-sector exposure, not sovereign over-spending #corroborates (0.95) — Mark Blyth, Austerity, 240
• States were complicit but did not cause the European debt crisis #corroborates (0.90) — Mark Blyth, Austerity, 199
• Unregulated banks, not subprime borrowers, drove the global financial crisis. #exemplifies (0.80) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1521
• The housing bubble traces to private securitization, not government GSE lending #exemplifies (0.75) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 888