Grčka - enormni dug, protesti oko mera štednje

[vememah]

1,8 mlrd u petak i jos 1,5 unapred odobrene ako zatreba za pon. U petak dignuto 1,2 milijarde.

[adam]

britanska vlada savetuje turiste koji idu u grcku da nose evre, kazu moze se desiti da nestane love, osobito ako idu na ostrva. cenim da je to dobar savet za sve koji se upute na tu stranu. 

[Prospero]

Politički element priče, sa predistorijom i opasnostima u bliskoj budućnosti:
 

Paul Mason
Friday 19 Jun 2015

Greek crisis: crunch time

 
We’re at a critical point in the Greek crisis, which is really the 2010-11 Euro crisis being unfrozen after five years of make believe solutions.
 
Money is leaving the banking system at the rate of a billion euros a day. Bank deposits stood at €164bn when the conservative-led coalition began to totter last December; were €132bn at last count and are probably close to €125bn and falling as I write.

The situation today has potential to turn into a bank run, especially after Luxembourg leaked details of a closed door Eurogroup meeting in which an ECB representative is said to have warned the banks may not be able to open Monday.

With reports that the governor of the Bank of Greece will seek a further €3bn in emergency credit at noon (10am UK time), the pressure is on Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis to impose capital controls: limiting movement of money outside Greece and limiting cash withdrawals.

Varoufakis believes what’s happening is orchestrated and, combined with last night’s rejection of his three point proposal to end the debt standoff, is part of Europe’s effort to panic the Greek government into surrendering on the terms of a debt deal, to impose more austerity.

There is political panic too. Last night a very well-heeled crowd of people from business, finance and the old political elite joined a demonstration – ostensibly non-party political and organised on Facebook – outside the Greek parliament. The participants called for Greece to stay in Europe, but even here many objected to the austerity measures being imposed.

They swarmed up the steps of parliament, casting eerie shadows as they stepped in front of its illuminating lights. It was not lost on supporters of the far-left government that many of those doing the swarming had participated in a government that routinely truncheoned and tear gassed people for coming even close to the former barricades around the building, which the present government has removed.

So what now? There’ll be a political summit on Monday. But there was a political summit two weeks ago, after which Angela Merkel, Francois Hollande, the IMF’s Christine Lagarde and the ECB’s Mario Draghi offered Greece a take-it-or-leave it deal to secure the funding it needs to repay the €15bn coming due to creditors this year.

The Greeks rejected it, first because they cannot deliver the specific austerity measures demanded on VAT and pensions; second because the IMF/ECB is forbidding them to count in non-tax measures like fighting corruption or a crackdown on evasion, to reach their proposed fiscal target of a 1 per cent surplus this year.

And because there’s no long-term deal on debt. The Greek debt – €320bn – is unpayable because the level of austerity required to service it and pay it down is impossible for any government to deliver. That’s why the old pro-austerity coalition fell.

Plus, the structure of the Greek economy – with its small shops, high tax-exemptions for the super-rich and heavy reliance on the state to stimulate growth – means that here austerity always squashes growth. As I’ve said before, Greece is not Ireland. Plus Greece can’t devalue and export – because it’s in the Euro; wages have already fallen 37 per cent; and it can’t manufacture its way out of trouble because it is an agricultural and tourism economy, not an industrial powerhouse.

In a way the two demonstrations that thronged parliament on Wednesday and Thursday night illustrate the popular delusions that the right and left here share. The pro-Syriza demo was against austerity but, for the majority, wanted Greece to remain in the Euro. The centre-right demo is against leaving the Euro but neither wants, nor when in power could deliver, the austerity required.

So something has to give. The EU leaders are hoping it will be Greece – aided by a shove created by a full-blown bank run, stoked by leaks and frantic reporting by the right-wing owned TV stations here. The Greek leadership says it cannot budge.
I’ve reported this crisis from inside the Brussels HQ of the Eurogroup and from inside the mansion of the radical left prime minister – and of course from the streets. Here’s what I think:

First, the working assumption of the Greek leadership – that Europe would drive a hard but fair bargain that allowed them to rebalance the economy without added austerity – was wrong. They told their voters they could soften austerity but stay in the Eurozone because key people in power had assured them that would happen: the US State Department, the Italian and French prime ministers, and the old Commission.
But there’s a new Commission dominated by the right, and the Italians and the French ran into a block of countries in northern and eastern Europe who – reflecting the views of their own right wing voters – refused to budge.

The “good Euro” Yanis Varoufakis thought he could create has not, so far happened.

Likewise Angela Merkel miscalculated: having removed Berlusconi in Italy, and the socialist PM George Papandreou in Greece in 2010, she assumed political pressure would cause Syriza to split. Its hard left would leave; Alexis Tsipras would soften once inside the marble corridors of the Maksimou mansion, and form a national coalition with a small, modernised neoliberal party called Potami, and with the support of a liberal wing of the conservatives around former PM Costas Karamanlis.

This has not happened. Though Syriza has effectively three operative factions – the hard left, a softer left around Tsipras, and a more moderate social democratic group including some non-party ministers – the critical factor has been the grassroots. Syriza is not like most British political parties, whose members barely get a say on policy: its MPs and ministers are in constant contact with layer upon layer of activists and voters.
One newly elected MP, stunned even to be in parliament after January, told me: “I can’t cave in because I have to go back to my village and live there; they elected us to fight.”

Alexis Tsipras, and even some of the people around him seen as moderates and existential pro-Europeans, hardened their stance during the past three weeks. Psychologically, they have become convinced the Eurozone is being run by Germany and Germany wants Greece out.

If there is, now, an increased bank run, restrictions on withdrawals, and a crisis over bank solvency, then by Monday the EU’s leaders will have a heavy stick to beat Syriza with. But if they don’t come with a carrot, and some room for compromise, the Greek leadership will default.

Then it will be up to Europe to decide: does it rescue Greece or expel it from the Eurozone? A country with migrants flooding across an unpoliced border with Turkey, one land border away from the Islamic State, and with a left tradition that is always prepared to do deals with Moscow. That makes this a geo-strategic moment, not just an economic moment.

If you ask yourself why Syriza does not just fold, live to fight another day, you haven’t been watching the TV enough. After five years of austerity, imposed first by the socialists then a conservative-led coalition, the process has destroyed every political force that tried to make it happen.
The conservative right is fragmented, at war with itself; the old Pasok party, which once gained 40 per cent of the vote, can now fit all of its MPs around a table. Smaller parties that joined the austerity bandwagon – like the moderate Marxist DIMAR and the nationalist rightwing LAOS – just disappeared.
The Greek leadership will play this as Greece versus Euro-imperialism. They will, in the face of a totally hostile TV and newspaper media, appeal to the 41 per cent of Greeks who prize fighting austerity more than membership of a currency in which they are always the black sheep. They’ll have no shortage of supporters in the economics profession – including many traditional right wingers – who’ve observed the Euro and its hapless central bank become a dysfunctional and unpredictable structure.

The country will divide: right versus left – as it has been divided since British tanks rolled into Syntagma square in 1944 to install former Nazi collaborators into office in preference to the communist-led resistance.

But this time we don’t know who’ll win. For certain we’ll know who’s lost: everybody in Europe who argued the EU can contain the economic aspirations of the left as well as the right.

[Prospero]

I ovo, za nedeljno čitanje :)
 
 

Greek debt crisis is the Iraq War of finance
Guardians of financial stability are deliberately provoking a bank run and endangering Europe's system in their zeal to force Greece to its knees

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

6:29PM BST 19 Jun 2015


Rarely in modern times have we witnessed such a display of petulance and bad judgment by those supposed to be in charge of global financial stability, and by those who set the tone for the Western world.

The spectacle is astonishing. The European Central Bank, the EMU bail-out fund, and the International Monetary Fund, among others, are lashing out in fury against an elected government that refuses to do what it is told. They entirely duck their own responsibility for five years of policy blunders that have led to this impasse.

They want to see these rebel Klephts hanged from the columns of the Parthenon – or impaled as Ottoman forces preferred, deeming them bandits - even if they degrade their own institutions in the process.

If we want to date the moment when the Atlantic liberal order lost its authority – and when the European Project ceased to be a motivating historic force – this may well be it. In a sense, the Greek crisis is the financial equivalent of the Iraq War, totemic for the Left, and for Souverainistes on the Right, and replete with its own “sexed up” dossiers.

Does anybody dispute that the ECB – via the Bank of Greece - is actively inciting a bank run in a country where it is also the banking regulator by issuing this report on Wednesday?

It warned of an "uncontrollable crisis" if there is no creditor deal, followed by soaring inflation, "an exponential rise in unemployment", and a "collapse of all that the Greek economy has achieved over the years of its EU, and especially its euro area, membership".

The guardian of financial stability is consciously and deliberately accelerating a financial crisis in an EMU member state - with possible risks of pan-EMU and broader global contagion – as a negotiating tactic to force Greece to the table.

It did so days after premier Alexis Tsipras accused the creditors of "laying traps" in the negotiations and acting with a political motive. He more or less accused them of trying to destroy an elected government and bring about regime change by financial coercion.

I leave it to lawyers to decide whether this report is a prima facie violation of the ECB’s primary duty under the EU treaties. It is certainly unusual. The ECB has just had to increase emergency liquidity to the Greek banks by €1.8bn (enough to last to Monday night) to offset the damage from rising deposit flight.

In its report, the Bank of Greece claimed that failure to meet creditor demands would “most likely” lead to the country’s ejection from the European Union. Let us be clear about the meaning of this. It is not the expression of an opinion. It is tantamount to a threat by the ECB to throw the Greeks out of the EU if they resist.

This is not the first time that the ECB has strayed far from its mandate. It forced the Irish state to make good the claims of junior bondholders of Anglo-Irish Bank, saddling Irish taxpayers with extra debt equal to 20pc of GDP.
This was done purely in order to save the European banking system at a time when the ECB was refusing to do the job itself, betraying the primary task of a central bank to act as a lender of last resort.

It sent secret letters to the elected leaders of Spain and Italy in August 2011 demanding detailed changes to internal laws for which it had no mandate or technical competence, even meddling in neuralgic issues of labour law that had previously led to the assassination of two Italian officials by the Red Brigades.

When Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi balked, the ECB switched off bond purchases, driving 10-year yields to 7.5pc. He was forced from office in a back-room coup d’etat, albeit one legitimised by the ageing ex-Stalinist EU fanatic who then happened to be president of Italy.
Lest we forget, it parachuted in its vice-president – Lucas Papademos – to take over Greece when premier George Papandreou merely suggested that he might submit the EMU bail-out package to a referendum, a wise idea in retrospect. That makes two coups d’etat. Now Syriza fears they are angling for a third.

The creditor power structure has lost its way. The IMF is in confusion. It is enforcing a contractionary austerity policy in Greece – with no debt relief, exchange cushion, or offsetting investment - that has been discredited by its own elite research department as scientifically unsound.
The Fund’s culpability in this fiasco is by now well known. As I argued last week, its own internal documents show that the original bail-out in 2010 was designed to rescue the EMU banking system and monetary union at a time when it had no defences against contagion. Greece was sacrificed.
One should have thought that the IMF would wish to lower the political temperature, given that its own credibility and long-term survival are at stake.

 

But no, Christine Lagarde has upped the political ante by stating that Greece will fall into arrears immediately if it misses a €1.6bn payment to the Fund on June 30. In my view, this is a discretionary escalation. The normal procedure is to notify the IMF Board after 30 days. This period is a de facto grace period, and in a number of past cases the arrears were cleared up quietly during the interval before the matter ever reached the Board.

The IMF could have let this process run in the case of Greece. It has chosen not to do so, ostensibly on the grounds that the sums are unusually large.

 

Klaus Regling, head of the eurozone bail-out fund (EFSF), entered on cue to hint strongly that his organisation would trigger cross-default clauses on its Greek bonds – 45pc of the Greek package – even though there is no necessary reason why it should do so. It is an optional matter for the EFSF board.
He seems to be threatening an EFSF default, even though the Greeks themselves are not doing so, a remarkable state of affairs.

It is obvious what is happening. The creditors are acting in concert. Instead of stopping to reflect for one moment on the deeper wisdom of their strategy, they are doubling down mechanically, appearing to assume that terror tactics will cow the Greeks at the twelfth hour.

Personally, I am a Burkean conservative with free market views. Ideologically, Syriza is not my cup tea. Yet we Burkeans do like democracy – and we don’t care for monetary juntas – even if it leads to the election of a radical-Left government.
As it happens, Edmund Burke would have found the plans presented to the Eurogroup last night by finance minister Yanis Varoufakis to be rational, reasonable, fair, and proportionate. 

They include a debt swap with ECB bonds coming due in July and August exchanged for bonds from the bail-out fund. They would have longer maturities and lower interest rates, reflecting the market borrowing cost of the creditors.

Syriza said from the outset that it was eager to work on market reforms with the OECD, the leading authority. It wants to team up with the International Labour Organisation on Scandinavian style flexi-security and labour reforms, a valid alternative to the German-style Hartz IV reforms that have impoverished the bottom fifth of German society and which no Left-wing movement can stomach.

It wished to push through a more radical overhaul of the Greek state that anything yet done under five years of Troika rule – and much has been done, to be fair.

As Mr Varoufakis told Die Zeit: “Why does a kilometer of freeway cost three times as much where we are as it does in Germany? Because we’re dealing with a system of cronyism and corruption. That’s what we have to tackle. But, instead, we’re debating pharmacy opening times."
The Troika pushed privatisation of profitable state assets at knock-down depression prices to private monopolies, to the benefit of an entrenched elite. To call that reforms invites a bitter cynicism.

The only reason that the Troika pushed this policy was in order to extract money. It was acting at a debt collector. “The reforms were a smokescreen. Whenever I tried talking about proposals, they were bored. I could see it in their body language," Mr Varoufakis told me.

The truth is that the creditor power structure never even looked at the Greek proposals. They never entertained the possibility of tearing up their own stale, discredited, legalistic, fatuous Troika script.

The decision was made from the outset to demand strict enforcement of the terms agreed in the original Memorandum, which even the last conservative pro-Troika government was unable to implement - regardless of whether it makes any sense, or actually increases the chance that Germany and other lenders will recoup their money.

At best, it is bureaucratic inertia, a prime exhibit of why the EU has become unworkable, almost genetically incapable of recognising and correcting its own errors.

At worst, it is nasty, bullying, insistence on ritual capitulation for the sake of it.

We all know the argument. The EU is worried about political “moral hazard”, about what Podemos might achieve in Spain, or the eurosceptics in Italy, or the Front National in France, if Syriza is seen to buck the system and get away with it.

But do the proponents of this establishment view – and one hears it a lot – really think that Podemos can be defeated by crushing Syriza, or that they can discourage Marine Le Pen by violating the sovereignty and sensibilities of a nation?

Do they think that the EU’s ever-declining hold on the loyalty of Europe’s youth can be reversed by creating a martyr state on the Left? Do they not realize that this is their own Guatemala, the radical experiment of Jacobo Arbenz that was extinguished by the CIA in 1954, only to set off the Cuban revolution and thirty years of guerrilla warfare across Latin America? Don’t these lawyers – and yes they are almost all lawyers - ever look beyond their noses?

The Versailles victors assumed reflexively that they had the full weight of moral authority on their side when they imposed their Carthiginian settlement on a defeated Germany in 1919 and demanded the payment of debts that they themselves invented. History judged otherwise.

 

[hazard]

Odličan tekst Evans-Pričarda. Da se čovek složi od A do Š.

[Muwan]

Još da zaključimo kako sa Grčkom ne sme biti napravljena greška kao sa Nemačkom posle ww1 i mind fuck će biti kompletan.

The Versailles victors assumed reflexively that they had the full weight of moral authority on their side when they imposed their Carthiginian settlement on a defeated Germany in 1919 and demanded the payment of debts that they themselves invented. History judged otherwise.

 

[MancMellow]

Iako, naravno, ne treba smetnuti s uma da je ovo, ipak, pre svega 1 reklama za potrebu reforme EU (re: Cameron), vidi se da ima i isrenog ubeđenja.

 

"Institucije" će uspeti ono što je verovatno samo fašistima pre njih pošlo za rukom: da nekako metnu Burkeovce i Marksiste na istu stranu  :D

 

Super tekst.

Edited June 21, 2015 by MancMellow

[Tribun_Populi]

Meni ovo zapalo za oko

 

 

At best, it is bureaucratic inertia, a prime exhibit of why the EU has become unworkable, almost genetically incapable of recognising and correcting its own errors.

At worst, it is nasty, bullying, insistence on ritual capitulation for the sake of it.

 

Mislim da je negde na pola od svega, ali su pojedini momenti u celoj drami baš onako ogoljeno prikazivali čas jedno, čas drugo. I da, ili će se ceo sistem reformisati što pre, ili mu je ovo početak kraja.

[hazard]

Meni je glavno ono što sam i sam ovde X puta napisao, da se ECB opasno igra sa svojom ulogom garanta evra i bankarskog sistema evrozone. ECB treba da bude nezavisni neutralni regulator i ,,žirant" monetarnog sistema, a ne da vrši pritisak na vlade. I zbog toga pada u vodu cela ta priča kako će ECB i ostatak EU da štite slabe članice evrozone ako izbace Grke - da, štitiće ih, sve dok i u tim zemljama na vlast ne dođe stranke koje se ideološki ne dopadaju vladi u Nemačkoj. Onda će i one biti puštene niz vodu. Dakle ako ode Grčka, možda neće momentalno doći do kraha Portugalije recimo, ali će na sledećim portugalskim izborima tržišta ukoliko da spekulišu da li je to moguće. Jako jako neodgovorno ponašanje.

[MancMellow]

Meni je glavno ono što sam i sam ovde X puta napisao, da se ECB opasno igra sa svojom ulogom garanta evra i bankarskog sistema evrozone. ECB treba da bude nezavisni neutralni regulator i ,,žirant" monetarnog sistema, a ne da vrši pritisak na vlade. I zbog toga pada u vodu cela ta priča kako će ECB i ostatak EU da štite slabe članice evrozone ako izbace Grke - da, štitiće ih, sve dok i u tim zemljama na vlast ne dođe stranke koje se ideološki ne dopadaju vladi u Nemačkoj. Onda će i one biti puštene niz vodu. Dakle ako ode Grčka, možda neće momentalno doći do kraha Portugalije recimo, ali će na sledećim portugalskim izborima tržišta ukoliko da spekulišu da li je to moguće. Jako jako neodgovorno ponašanje.

 

Pa ne, to je momentalno poruka - vidite šta će vam se desiti ako izaberete te i te. Evropske nacije, da ne pričam one koje su bile velike kolonijalne sile, uglavnom imaju neku predstavu o svojoj veličini (pogrešnu, ali svejedno) loše reaguju na tu vrstu indirektne ucene, odnosno imaju tendenciju da da makar i podsvesno glasaju iz otpora. I to ne nužno za neke kao što je Syriza

 

Pri tom je super što je neko kao on i to u Telegrafu napisao ovo u vezi 1 koordinirane akcije, jer da je to napisao neko drugi negde drugde iz keca bi bio optužen za teoriju zavere. 

[hazard]

Pa jeste poruka, naravno, ali kao što kažeš može se desiti da baš iz inata glasaju za neke takve. Ili još gore. Nisu Grci jedini koji umeju da guslaju o svom nacionalnom dostojanstvu

[Anduril]

Dva teksta koja sam preneo kao i ovaj iz Torigrafa po meni u potpunosti masu poentu.

 

Bave se uglavnom ekonomskim aspektima ili ECB-om a problem je u osnovi politicki:

 

- potpuni nedostatak poverenja izmedju Sirize (i uopste grcke politicke elite) i ostatka Evrozone koje ce biti prakticno nemoguce povratiti

- realnost da nijedna vlada u Grckoj, a ponajmanje klijentelisticka Siriza, nece biti u stanju da sprovede strukturne reforme bez obzira na pomoc iz Evrope

- Evrozona i evropski federalizam moraju da pocivaju na pravilima i dogovorima koji su iznad trenutnog birackog raspolozenja. To je osnova svake pravne drzave pa zato i ne cudi da nacionalisticki elementi sa levice i desnice sirom Evrope to shvataju kao opasnost.

[aram]

auf. ajd samo ova druga teza:

 

po cemu je bas syriza pored micotakisa, papaandreua i slicnih klijentelisticka?

 

posto vec znas da nijedna grcka vlada nikada nece biti u stanju da sprovede reforme, sta raditi sa grckom?

[MancMellow]

Dva teksta koja sam preneo kao i ovaj iz Torigrafa po meni u potpunosti masu poentu.

 

Bave se uglavnom ekonomskim aspektima ili ECB-om a problem je u osnovi politicki:

 

- potpuni nedostatak poverenja izmedju Sirize (i uopste grcke politicke elite) i ostatka Evrozone koje ce biti prakticno nemoguce povratiti

- realnost da nijedna vlada u Grckoj, a ponajmanje klijentelisticka Siriza, nece biti u stanju da sprovede strukturne reforme bez obzira na pomoc iz Evrope

- Evrozona i evropski federalizam moraju da pocivaju na pravilima i dogovorima koji su iznad trenutnog birackog raspolozenja. To je osnova svake pravne drzave pa zato i ne cudi da nacionalisticki elementi sa levice i desnice sirom Evrope to shvataju kao opasnost.

 

1. generalizacija + predviđanje budućnosti

2. baš je Syriza primer klijentelizma... + opet predviđanje budućnosti

3. Ta (pravna) država ne postoji. Pravila se poštuju od onog momenta kad se kao takva (federalna) uvedu

 

At Aram

 

Pa izbaciti je, kao i ostale balkanske zgubidane, dabome. 

 

Ali meni je najbolje kako sad ekonomija nema veze :D 

[Prospero]

 

- Evrozona i evropski federalizam moraju da pocivaju na pravilima i dogovorima koji su iznad trenutnog birackog raspolozenja. To je osnova svake pravne drzave pa zato i ne cudi da nacionalisticki elementi sa levice i desnice sirom Evrope to shvataju kao opasnost.

 

Pa nema tih pravila koja će odgovarati svima u Evropi.

 

S druge strane, nek uvedu i fiksalnu uniju, tj. zaokruže ekonomski projekat, pa onda sink or swim, nek se uvedu pravila uz razne izlazne tj penalne mehanizme. Ali to neće uraditi zato što - wait for it - neće Berlin da presipa pare. Dakle nema one-size-fits-all rešenja, pa tako ni the pravila™ na smislenim osnovama koje bi bilo preče i starije od političkih gibanja i demokratije.