[Fenntrek]

I think you misunderstand.

Yes, the EU as a whole looks good...

It's when you peel away the EU flag and look at individual countries you see that some economies are in the gutter pretty much due to countries having vastly different needs.

Whats in say Germany's interests isn't in Italy/Greece's interest economically, economies are having crisis points constantly and continuous band aids instead of enacting policy that will fix it with a solid foundation.

I personally don't know whats needed to fix this, even Europe-wide economic policy is a hard sell because of the vastly different needs of individual countries within the union.

Something needs to happen, there's a generation of young people being left behind with unemployment/underemployment and their future is becoming more and more murky.

[speeder]

This is not just a EU problem.

I personally think the social changes, coupled with gold standard being dropped are good part of the culprit.

For example I am in Brazil, that have "nothing to do" with EU and US.

Yet I have a mountain of debts, negative net worth, finished university in 2009, and I am yet to get a legal job.

Brazil, even at its "height", when people were praising Lula because it reached 7% of GDP growth and "Full Employment", if you looked into other numbers closely, would find out that most of the money went to the wealthiest, and that underemployment, illegal employment, self-employment, etc... that were on the rise, out of desperation of the people. Or you think I went since 2009 without eating? Of course if people offer me shady deal I accept it! Otherwise I can't even buy potatoes!

Similarly, every single friend I have, except 1, are still single, of all friends I have, only 2 have kids, noone owns his own house and car, most of my friends never got legal full-time jobs either...

This situation in turn removed lots of rights to me.

For example, election rules say you can only use money you declared in your tax returns, and that donors can only use up to 10% of their tax return, since I, and my friends never did tax returns (because our income is not exactly legal), we can't join politics in any way.

Similarly, since we never had a legal job, we can't claim unemployment benefits.

Since we have no tax return, neither legal job history, we can't apply for more loans.

And the list goes on...

And this is not just in Brazil, people of my age I know in other western countries, are mostly in the same situation.

[hx87]

> coupled with gold standard being dropped

What exactly does the gold standard have to do with economic troubles around the world? All the gold standard would do is subject any country that adheres to it to crippling deflation whenever the economy grows and crippling inflation whenever it contracts.

[antisthenes]

The global financial crisis was engineered to transfer more wealth to the elites and slow down population growth by making housing unaffordable to the millenial generation.

[madshiva]

I said that the figures were wrong, the cause of the Recession is not only the fault of Europe since it was already the case before.

I life and work in the recession since the beginning. I can't handle anymore. Old people need to pay for the all the shit they have done.

The Europe need to collapse, I mean the EU economy but not in the mentality. I'm Swiss, I'm EU but only for the map, not for the economy. We are not together and like you say we will always see was it benefit for us, not for other. It's an human behavior. If they really want a global united EU, they need to make a big unique country but this will never happen.