Portugal and the Tony Soprano bailout

In the excellent TV series The Sopranos there is an episode where mobster Tony Soprano tells a small-time gambler why he let him play and lose in the big stakes game. "I knew you could never afford it, but your wife had the sports goods store," he explains after stripping the store of its assets and bankrupting it.

The Sopranos is available in Portuguese. Viewers will find out more about their fate than from most media coverage now Portugal is the latest economy to fall into the clutches of the European commission and, possibly the IMF. It is a mobster's embrace, as Irish and Greek citizens can testify.

You can read the rest of PE blogger Michael Burke's piece on the Guardian website here.

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