Poland’s finance ministers slug it out over pensions and public debt | beyondbrics

"Fights between enemies are nothing unusual. It is battles between (former) friends that tend to be the most bitter, as is the case in an ongoing conflict between Jacek Rostowski, Poland’s finance minister, and Leszek Balcerowicz (pictured), a former finance minister, central banker and the architect of Poland’s post-communist economic reforms.

The two used to be close allies. Rostowski advised Balcerowicz when he was crafting Poland’s passage from communism to capitalism in the early 1990s, and then again when Balcerowicz headed the National Bank of Poland.

But in recent years Balcerowicz’s attachment to an increasingly unfashionable neo-liberal strand of economic thought has put him at odds with Rostowski, who has shed his ideological heritage in favour of trying to keep Poland’s public finances from spinning wildly out of control."

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