Economic equations do not include people.

Yanis Varoufakis, Finance Minister of Greece is in the US, talking to the International Monetary Fund about extending its line of credit to pay salaries and pensions of public sector employees and to repay 450 million Euros to the IMF on 9 April. It is like the poor in India. Borrow money to survive a crisis, borrow more to pay the interest and then end up as bonded labor for generations as the loan piles up faster than they can repay. Economists build intricate economic models which win them Nobel Prizes. Company bosses make wrong decisions and then ruthlessly fire thousands of employees to cut costs so as to preserve shareholder returns and pay themselves fat bonuses. Politicians use taxpayer money as bribes to get votes without any fear of punishment. One common wheeze by politicians in India is to forgive all loans to farmers. This does not help the landless because they normally borrow from local moneylenders, banks are saddled with huge bad loans and the farmers who feel happy to be free of debt are marked as defaulters and denied further loans in future. Bad for farmers, bad for banks and bad for the economy but politicians are never punished. Lawyers seem to have cornered top economic posts in the world. The CEO of the IMF, Christine Lagarde is a lawyer, Treasury Secretary in the US, Jack Lew is a lawyer and in India, former Finance Ministers P Chidambaram and Pranab Mukherjee are lawyers, as is the present incumbent, Arun Jaitely. Lawyers charge huge fees to interpret the law to favor their clients, irrespective of any human misery they cause in the process. Politicians have to win elections every few years to stay in power. Economic policies are designed to favor politicians and their backers. While millions of people lost their homes in the sub-prime crisis of 2008 no banker has gone to prison. Instead bonuses are rising once again even if profits are still depressed. Bankers know that politicians will rescue them with taxpayer money if there is another crisis. Politicians are never held accountable for their policies. Greece is in this predicament because a former government fudged the budget to become part of the Euro. Yet the EU, the IMF or the European Central Bank are not demanding that they be charged with financial fraud even as Greece is being asked to cut public sector jobs and pensions, causing severe hardship to its people. That is because politicians of Germany, France and the UK do not want to set a precedent in case they are charged for economic crimes in the future. So, the Congress was able to bankrupt our country by spending vast amounts to bribe voters, secure in the knowledge that they will not be held to account. We, the people, have suffered. It will never change. Hence, the world will continue to become poorer.