The mirage of expansionary fiscal consolidation to resolve the euro-area crisis

The euro- area crisis is not a ‘sovereign debt’ crisis, as the conventional view depicts it. As a number of non- mainstream economists have been explaining since the euro- area crisis broke out (at the end of 2009), this crisis is the result of unsustainable macro- economic imbalances across the private sector of the euroarea, which have built up and remained largely unaddressed in the fi rst ten years of the European Monetary Union (EMU).