Financialisation and the crisis: the case of Greece

The present chapter analyses the changing relationship between the real and the financial sector in the course of the long-run development of the Greek economy, focusing on the effects of financialisation and on its connection to the current economic crisis. The first section offers a brief discussion of the basic tendencies characterising the long-run development of the Greek economy over the past three decades. The second section examines the effect of financialisation on several aspects of the real economy, including income distribution, gross capital formation, consumption and the evolution of the current account. In the third section, the results of the preceding analysis are linked to the outbreak of the current crisis, in an attempt to explain the reasons behind this crisis’s excessive severity in the case of the Greek economy, while the fourth section concludes.