Crisis and inequality

From Richard Wolff (see link here)

As economic crises, declines and dislocations increasingly hurt or threaten people around the globe, they provoke questions. How are we to understand the forces that produced the 2008 crisis, the crisis itself, with its quick bailouts and stimulus programs, and now the debts, austerity policies and deepening economic inequalities that do not go away? Economies this troubled force people to think and react. Some resign themselves to “hard times” as if they were natural events. Some pursue individual strategies trying to escape the troubles. Some mobilize to fight whoever they blame for it all. Many are drawn to scapegoating, usually encouraged by politicians and parties seeking electoral advantages.  ....


For example, Germany’s recent history has featured reduced wages (especially via increasing part-time jobs), fewer social welfare protections, major bank bailouts in the crisis of 2008, rising inequality of income and wealth, austerity policies and so on. Its leaders around Merkel have responded by carefully rescripting their recent financial maneuvers as “Europe’s bailout of Greece” in a classic exercise in scapegoat economics. Three institutions (the “troika” of the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund) lent the Greek government money since 2010. Those loans were used chiefly to pay off the Greek government’s accumulated debts to private European banks (including especially German, French and Greek banks). The “bailout of Greece” was thus really an indirect bailout of those private banks.

Without that indirect bailout, those private banks would have suffered the usual losses that come when banks make loans that cannot be repaid. Those losses would have been costly for shareholders in those banks. The major shareholders among them include some of Germany’s richest and biggest capitalists. With their usual political power, they might have gotten the German government to bail them out directly again (since the German government had already done that directly a few years earlier in the 2008/2009 crisis). But such a second direct bank bailout would have been wildly unpopular with German voters and therefore politically dangerous for Germany’s top politicians.
Leading German politicians saw the “bailout of Greece” as an opportunity to serve their big-bank supporters with a second but indirect bailout that was disguised as “for Greece.” This gambit protected their political careers from voters’ wrath while getting all of Europe to share the cost of loans to Greece. German leaders then took the lead in insisting loudly that Greeks pay dearly for Europe’s loans. Merkel imposed a crushing austerity regime...

I've read this interpretation of German actions before (see here for one article).  German and French banks were heavily involved in Greece (as creditors).In this piece by Wolff, the argument is made that this kind of  globalization is an inevitable part of capitalism.