The phrase "exacerbate matters" is correct and commonly used in written English.
It means to make a situation or problem worse or more intense. Example: The government's failure to address the economic crisis only served to exacerbate matters for struggling families.
Yet they also concede that losing, as the Knicks have done for six straight years, will only exacerbate matters.
To exacerbate matters, the IOC continues to ignore all pleas over Rule 40, which imposes choking restrictions on non-Olympic sponsors.
And the funds are aware of the tensions their activities have already raised, and they are unlikely to exacerbate matters with aggressive acquisitions.
To exacerbate matters, a major expense for online retailers seems to be rising: the cost to advertise products on the search engine Google, the source of considerable traffic and visibility for most e-commerce sites.
(There is a chance that American fiscal austerity would also exacerbate matters).And that, I think, gets at why typical hand-wringing over "currency wars", meaning the ostentatious sort of battling, is misguided.
"To exacerbate matters, average temperatures were well above normal," giving California its warmest winter ever recorded, the report says.
Social networking sites like Facebook have only exacerbated matters.
The fact that it's a genocidal and secretive police state only exacerbates matters.
Erdoğan's unreliability extends to Syria itself, where his policies have arguably exacerbated matters.
Andersen exacerbated matters by pushing back against the referee Marc Davis, who was trying to break up the altercation.
PSG's status as sole representatives of the national capital already guaranteed nationwide unpopularity; Leonardo's victim mentality, allied with the grotesque investment from Qatar, only exacerbated matters.
