One can only feel sorry for Greece. For more than five years, the “troika” (the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund) has made it the object of a failed experiment with austerity that has exacerbated the country’s economic crisis. And now Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’s government seems hell-bent on plunging Greece into the abyss. It never had to be this way. By the time Tsipras’s leftist Syriza party came to power in January, a new, more growth-oriented compromise had become possible. Even hardcore German proponents of austerity – and certainly Chancellor Angela Merkel ... (full story)