Seminar
Katerina Sokou on the US Role in the Greek Debt Crisis
The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Centre for Hellenic Studies is pleased to a public seminar by Katerina Sokou, a visiting scholar at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs and the Washington, DC correspondent for Greek daily newspaper Kathimerini and SKAI TV, reporting on transatlantic relations, U.S. politics, and the IMF. She will be presenting her research in a talk entitled "The U.S. role in the Greek debt crisis: Small economy, big geopolitical implications."
Campus: SFU Burnaby
Room: Academic Quadrangle 6204
Date: January 15, 2018
Time: 2:30pm
This event is free, but seating is limited, please RSVP to hsevents@sfu.ca
Abstract
"The U.S. role in the Greek debt crisis: Small economy, big geopolitical implications"
What role did the U.S. play in trying to contain the Greek debt crisis, and what impact did it have? Why did the U.S. care about a small economy of the Eurozone that represents 0.3% of the global economy?
In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, the Greek debt crisis dominated the headlines and threatened to bring down the Eurozone, prompting the U.S. to act as a mediator between Greece and its European creditors in order to avoid a Greek default. But even as American involvement was deemed necessary due to the imminent danger of financial contagion, it was also rooted on geopolitical considerations: the need to safeguard U.S. interests in a traditionally volatile region amid new challenges like the refugee crisis, the civil war in Syria and increasingly fractious relations with Turkey.
Speaker Bio
Katerina Sokou is a visiting scholar at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs and the Washington, DC correspondent for Greek daily newspaper Kathimerini and SKAI TV, reporting on transatlantic relations, U.S. politics, and the IMF. She has covered extensively the Greek debt crisis, interviewing policy-makers, writing opinion pieces and providing commentary for news media in the US and Europe. She is a trained historian (University of Ioannina, Greece) with postgraduate studies in International Studies (University of Warwick, UK) and Journalism (Columbia University), where she was a Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Economics and Business Journalism. In the past, she worked at the business desk of the Washington Post, was international financial news editor at Kathimerini and European news editor at To Vima Greek daily, where she started her career as a financial reporter.