Nuno Teles is a lecturer at the Economics Faculty of the Federal University of Bahia, Brazil.
After the bank bailouts in 2008, the next stage in the government’s response was to cut spending on public services and lump even greater responsibilities onto private households. The end result was a huge rise in informal and unpaid labor carried out by women — and faced with the current shutdown, the losers from the last crisis are being punished even further.
Portugal is held up as an example of the compatibility of anti-austerity policies and remaining within the Eurozone. But this story doesn’t square with Portuguese people’s everyday experience.
Breaking up the banks won’t do. They should be publicly owned and democratically controlled.