A note on the Crisis in Greece, via the EU Referendum post

I thought I would detach this reply to the ongoing debate on the EU Referendum with a note on Greece, prompted by the reply from Sukumvit boy below.

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Originally Posted by sukumvit boy

Yeah , fascinating stuff ! Nobel efforts born out of the realization of the waste and futility of war and the economies of scale , trying to find a foothold in a new Europe.

The situation now further complicated by Greece , which it seems to me ,lied their way into the EU and now expects to be bailed out.

Also,thanks for the fun Casablanca trivia.

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The situation with Greece is either intensely complex or blatantly obvious -but the issue of lying is more related to Greece's entry into the Euro in 2001 rather than with its entry into the EU in 1981.

The criteria for membership of the Euro that were drawn up -as early as 1992- which were supposed to be applied to candidates applying for entry included the rule that a member's budget deficit not be higher than 3% of its GDP. Another rule is to show how it can reduce the deficit year on year.

When Greece applied in 2001, it claimed that its budget deficit was 1.5% whereas in fact it was around 8.3%. The sleight of hand in accounting that the Greeks produced meant that, for example, a loss making business such as the Greek railway network was not in fact shown to be losing a billion Euros a year, which it was -the network had more employees than passengers at the time- but not losing at all, as the railway company issued shares which were purchased by the government, thereby transforming a debt into a financial investment. On their part the European Central Bank and the European Commission failed to do the due diligence to obtain a more accurate profile of the Greek economy, and let's face it it was not that hard to do.

In addition, and more controversially, the Greek government was advised by Goldman Sachs to use credit swaps to hide more than $2.8 bn worth of debt by conducting the transaction of government bonds in private with a single bank, rather than offering the bonds for sale on the open market, though this did mean that the Greek government now owed Goldman Sachs $2.8bn. You can follow this in the programme in the BBC link here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-17108367

Now add in the 'investment' that the Greek government made to host the Olympic Games in 2004 at a cost of 9 billion euros -just don't ask what the financial return on this investment was (!)-, but also add in the devastating fact that with historical low interest rates in the financial markets, the Greeks allowed themselves to believe that they could borrow more than usual because of the low cost of borrowing, while the banks were happy to lend.

From this perspective, you can blame the Greek governments -both the left-wing PASOK and the right-wing New Democracy parties, for racking up more debt than they could repay, but also ask yourself who lent them the money in the first place? The irony, perhaps the bitter irony of Greece's economy, is that agriculture composes 3.5% of the economy, industry, including shipping and tourism composes 16%, while 80% is made up of services, of which the largest proportion is...yes, you guessed it, banking. The largest companies in Greece are Piraeus Bank, Alpha Bank, the National Bank of Greece, Hellenic Telecoms, Motor Oil, Public Power and Hellenic Petroleum. Something like 22% of the workforce are state employees, but if you then consider that in Sweden it is over 33% you might begin to realise that whatever Greece is good at financial management is not it. Apart from the fabulous nonsense of the Olympic Games, the arms manufacturers of the USA went smiling to the bank as Greece spent a substantial amount of its crisp new Euros on its military, the one that can't stop thousands of migrants from North Africa landing on its islands (now there is a clash of aspirations if ever there was one, to flee from civil war to economic chaos!).

The current situation is that today, Sunday July 5th, the Greeks are voting in a referendum on a ballot question that related to a financial package that has since been superseded, so that in policy terms it is irrelevant, whereas voting in favour of the package on the ballot form is assumed to be a vote to remain in the Euro, whereas a vote No is a vote of defiance.

The logical outcomes of this mess are:
a) Greece is forced out of the Euro zone, and the EU; or
b) Greece is forced out of the Eurozone but not the EU, ie it re-establishes its own curency and behaves like the UK which is also not part of the Eurozone (neither is Denmark);
c) Greece re-negotiates another package which includes the total cancellation of its outstanding debt, the re-capitalisation of its banks, but severe cuts to its state budget including pensions resulting in a shrinkage of the state sector by at least 50% and no prospects of economic growth for ten years.
In other words, Greece will have the basic cash to carry on without descending into civil war, but unless it finds substantial barrels of oil or fields of gold and diamonds, it will have to rely for its income on shipping, and tourism on the assumption that Greece will be the cheapest holiday destination in Europe, if not the happiest. The phrase 'We've been kebabbed' seems cruelly appropriate in this instance.

One alternative is that the Chinese, who have invested huge sums into the port of Piraeus in order to bring it yp to the scale of Rotterdam and Hamburg, could be persuaded to invest even more -they are more cash rich than the Russians and may relish the opportunity to deepen their investments in the EU. A longer term prospect is that if Greece remains in the EU and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) with the USA is concluded, the US can invest in Greece at favourable terms, can you resist it America?

Spare a thought for countries like Latvia and Estonia, poorer even than Greece, who will lose out if the debt is cancelled.

But ask yourself what would happen if, to take a wild example, California were to go bankrupt owing billions. Would it be forced out of the Dollar or the USA?

The moral of this story is so tired it ought not to be told, but is simply: Politicians lie all the time, so don't believe them! And, Don't borrow more money than you will ever be able to pay back.

It's when governments and institutions ignore the basic rules that the rules get broken and systems buckle and break in return.

Brilliant overview , very helpful ,thank you. More complex than I realized.

Don't know how accurate this is, but some of it did kind of make me chuckle:
http://nypost.com/2015/07/05/decades...t-of-billions/

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Originally Posted by fred41

Don't know how accurate this is, but some of it did kind of make me chuckle:
http://nypost.com/2015/07/05/decades...t-of-billions/

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The cynical way in which people at the bottom milk the system is reflected in the cynical way that people at the top milk it. Perfectly sighted people claiming benefits for the blind are doing the same thing as billionaires not paying taxes, or Members of the UK Parliament fiddling their expenses so that when they want bookshelves in their apartment they charge it to the taxpayer most of whom earn substantially less in wages than MPs. That this happens in the EU is beyond doubt, but it happens in most places, and until it is rigorously policed -if such policing can be afforded- it will continue. It doesn't look so bad until there is an economic crisis, and then you see the cracks and it is scary.

27 Feb 1953 - the day Greece cancelled half of Germany's debt



http://jubileedebt.org.uk/reports-br...anys-debt-1953

A few figures

But Martin, the banks became too big to fail. Greece accounts for 2% of the EU's economy -well, it was 2%....I think part of the problem is that when the Euro was created they did not build into it the mechanism for an orderly withdrawal if something went wrong. There is a view that the whole project was not only doomed from the start but that the UK's crashing out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992 was an early example of how things can go wrong. I recall with some pain the 15% interest rates at the time -unthinkable today. If interest rates were raised to 5% the economy -the housing market for sure?- would probably collapse.

Mary Anne Sieghart wrote about this a few years ago
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/...d-6296580.html

Basic problem with the Euro is that its exchange rate and loan requirements are set once across the EU, while the ability of individual member states to match the usual loan conditions should be at state level. So Greece and other members states borrowed too cheaply against their own GDP.

Hmm, I've never been to Greece, I'd like to, maybe a Greco-Roman holiday exploring all those old ruins. My niece said Greece is a dirty place, as in trash all over the streets dirty. My experience in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria was those countries have it more together than the States, the cities are cultural meccas, the countryside is beautiful- all the windows have flower boxes. Beautiful but everything is expensive.
Greece is like the American Ghet-toe, money goes in but doesn't come out. Indiginous Populants drink ouzo all day and collect their unemployment, disability, and welfare checks.


You can't really call it Europe without Greece, as an outsider I hope they pull it off, I dunno, flip a coin.

Last night (9th July 2015) the Greek Government submitted its latest proposals to the Troika -the EU, the European Central Bank and the IMF.

The proposals show that Greece is prepared to make significant changes to its domestic economic and fiscal policy. These will include:
-changes to VAT which will rise for most commodities, to 23% in the case of theatres and restaurants, but not in the islands which are dependent on tourism for their income;
-increasing retirement age to 67 over the next seven years;
-increasing corporation tax to the IMF's favoured figure of 28% -Greece had wanted to raise it to 29%;
-military spending cut to $100m for the rest of 2015, and $200m in 2016, meaning Greece will not be able to meet NATO's spending target on defence at 2% of GDP;
-reforms to improve tax collection and to combat tax evasion;
-the privatisation of state assets such as ports and airports -although many MPs are opposed to this.

These proposals are made in order to persuade the Troika to authorise a $53.5bn loan to Greece to enable it to begin the process of re-structuring both the economy and the debt.

The proposals expose the Greek government to the wrath of its MPs, and appear to show that the referendum which rejected many of the proposals now being offered was a waste of time, which is in any case true of most referenda.

The proposals are more in line with the proposals of the IMF, so perhaps it is not surprising that Christine Lagarde did not attend the meeting in Brussels earlier this week which set the deadline which the Greeks met last night.

But it does now expose Mrs Merkel to opposition in Germany and, indeed, in her own party where Germans feel the Greeks are asking too much of them, again and again and again. The intervention of the US Government, which has expressed concern that the crisis threatens the integrity of the EU, is an additional pressure on Mrs Merkel, while the French Prime Minister, Manuel Valls has declared that Greece must remain a member of the Eurozone. It is even possible that Mrs Merkel might not survive this crisis as leader of her party.

But it is futile at this stage to predict what happens next -there is opposition to these proposals in both Greece and Germany, but the options are limited. The harsh reality is that most of Greece's debt is never going to be repaid, but just as harsh is that the quality of life in Greece is going to decline for most people in work over the next ten years, if they are in work. Opposition to the proposals in Greece could lead to the collapse of the government there and new elections, yet the next government is likely to be more congenial to the Troika than Syriza.

We are in that weird dimension where the only progress that can be made, comes from a lose-lose situation. In other words, we still haven't reached that rock bottom from which the only way is up. To call it a rocky ride is an under-statement.

http://www.theguardian.com/business/...as-draghi-live

The latest agreement with Greece -it has even been called an AGreekment, has also been compared to the Treaty of Versailles that was imposed on the Germans after the First World War, only much harsher.

The core elements listed in The Guardian are these:

• carry out ambitious pension reforms and specify policies to fully compensate for the fiscal impact of the Constitutional Court ruling on the 2012 pension reform and to implement the zero deficit clause or mutually agreeable alternative measures by October 2015;
• adopt more ambitious product market reforms with a clear timetable for implementation of all OECD toolkit I recommendations, including Sunday trade, sales periods, pharmacy ownership, milk and bakeries, except over-the-counter pharmaceutical products, which will be implemented in a next step, as well as for the opening of macro-critical closed professions (e.g. ferry transportation). On the follow-up of the OECD toolkit-II, manufacturing needs to be included in the prior action;
• on energy markets, proceed with the privatisation of the electricity transmission network operator (ADMIE), unless replacement measures can be found that have equivalent effect on competition, as agreed by the Institutions;
• on labour markets, undertake rigorous reviews and modernisation of collective bargaining, industrial action and, in line with the relevant EU directive and best practice, collective dismissals, along the timetable and the approach agreed with the Institutions. On the basis of these reviews, labour market policies should be aligned with international and European best practices, and should not involve a return to past policy settings which are not compatible with the goals of promoting sustainable and inclusive growth;
• adopt the necessary steps to strengthen the financial sector, including decisive action on non-performing loans and measures to strengthen governance of the HFSF and the banks, in particular by eliminating any possibility for political interference especially in appointment processes.

And on top of that, Greece will also establish a new fund to sell off valuable assets to help repay its new bailout, and refinance its banks.
Or as the statement put it:

• develop a significantly scaled up privatisation programme with improved governance; valuable Greek assets will be transferred to an independent fund that will monetize the assets through privatisations and other means. The monetization of the assets will be one source to make the scheduled repayment of the new loan of ESM and generate over the life of the new loan a targeted total of €50bn of which €25bn will be used for the repayment of recapitalization of banks and other assets and 50% of every remaining euro (i.e. 50% of €25bn) will be used for decreasing the debt to GDP ratio and the remaining 50% will be used for investments.

Alexis Tsipras must now get this through the Greek Parliament, arrange For Sale signs to be put up all over Greece, and hope that hope continues to exist as a marketable commodity.

The link is here but contains a lot of information
http://www.theguardian.com/business/...d-no-deal-live

It's going to be interesting to see how all that plays out over the next several years.

Or just the next ten days!

Listening to interviews with Greeks on National Public Radio , lots of young people saying that although they love their country they will probably leave to seek careers outside their country. Greece may become the Philippines of Europe.

We have reached the weekend and although both Alexis Tsipras and Angela Merkel faced large rebellions in their own parties, both successfully presented the deal to their respective Parliaments. The deal is now expected to cost 86 billion Euros, but it is not clear how this will provide a long term foundation for economic growth in Greece, so many are predicting that in six months time we shall we back where were last week, only many more billions of Euros poorer...and yes, many Greeks of a certain age if they have not done so already, will be looking for work somewhere else.

Phil the Greek should tap Betty up for a loan...She's got some spare change rattling around!