POR QUE ALEMANIA NO ACEPTA CORTAR LA
DEUDA A GRECIA?
Por qué busca sacarlos de la Unión y
no re-estructurar su deuda?
Aquí presento la respuesta de Yanis Varufakis
al respecto.
Lo que ofrezco es solo una sumilla, a
manera de introducción.
INTRODUCCION
Hugo Adan, julio 11, 2015
Grecia es víctima del plan Aleman de
evitar la salida de grandes miembros de la Union Europea. Sacar a Grecia de la
Union, con el castigo severo de multiplicar su deuda, arruinar su Banco
Nacional y a su pueblo, dejaría precedente para quienes lo intenten hacer
luego. No les interesa la nación Griega,
lo que quieren es salvar el macro-sistema imperial bancario que ambos Alemania
y el US tienen sobre los pueblos de Europa. La deuda es una fuente inmensas
rentas para las mafias banqueras que engordan con el capital buitre. Para
evitar la salida de los grandes –entre ellos Francia- quieren dejar un ejemplo
del castigo que les espera si optan por salir de la Union. Grecia fue elegido
para el castigo. Estos, en su Referendum dijeron que NO a la austeridad, no a
la miseria, pero si quieren ser parte de una Europa que no asfixie a sus pueblos,
quieren ellos una Europa sin mafias banqueras, una Europa con responsabilidad
social, una Europa Federada, como fue el
objetivo inicial.
Sacar a Grecia de Europa va a tener
un costo económico y social mucho más elevado que los 53.5 billones de Euros
que ellos piden para levantar la economía y la banca Griega, préstamo que ellos
si prometen pagarlo en menos de 5 años.
----
Posted on July
11, 2015 by yanisv
Tomorrow’s EU Summit will seal Greece’s fate in the
Eurozone. As these lines are being written, Euclid Tsakalotos, my great friend,
comrade and successor as Greece’s Finance Ministry is heading for
a Eurogroup meeting that will determine whether a last ditch agreement
between Greece and our creditors is reached and whether this agreement contains the degree of
debt relief that could render the Greek economy viable within the Euro Area.
Euclid is taking with him a moderate, well-thought out debt
restructuring plan that is undoubtedly in the interests both of Greece and
its creditors. (Details of it I intend to publish here on Monday, once the dust
has settled.) If these modest debt restructuring proposals are turned down, as the German finance minister has foreshadowed, Sunday’s
EU Summit will be deciding between kicking Greece out of the Eurozone now
or keeping it in for a little while longer, in a state of deepening
destitution, until it leaves some time in the future.
The question is: Why is the German finance Minister,
Dr Wolfgang Schäuble, resisting a sensible, mild, mutually beneficial debt
restructure? The following op-ed just published in today’s The Guardian
offers my answer. [Please note that the Guardian’s title was not of my
choosing. Mine read, as above: Behind Germany’s refusal to grant Greece
debt relief ). Click here for the op-ed or…
Greece’s financial drama has dominated the headlines for five years for one
reason: the stubborn refusal of our creditors to offer essential debt relief.
Why, against common sense, against the IMF’s verdict and against the everyday
practices of bankers facing stressed debtors, do they resist a debt restructure? The answer cannot be found in economics
because it resides deep in Europe’s labyrinthine politics.
In 2010, the Greek state became insolvent. Two options consistent
with continuing membership of the eurozone presented themselves: the
sensible one, that any decent banker would recommend – restructuring
the debt and reforming the economy; and the
toxic option – extending new loans to a bankrupt entity while pretending
that it remains solvent.
Official Europe chose the second
option, putting the bailing out of French and German banks exposed to Greek
public debt above Greece’s socioeconomic viability. A
debt restructure would have implied losses for the bankers on their Greek debt
holdings. Keen to avoid
confessing to parliaments that taxpayers would have to pay again for the banks
by means of unsustainable new loans, EU officials presented the Greek state’s
insolvency as a problem of illiquidity, and justified the “bailout” as a case
of “solidarity” with the Greeks.
To frame the cynical transfer of irretrievable private
losses on to the shoulders of taxpayers as an exercise in “tough love”, record austerity was imposed on Greece,
whose national income, in turn – from which new
and old debts had to be repaid – diminished by more than a quarter. It
takes the mathematical expertise of a smart eight-year-old to know that this
process could not end well.
Once the sordid operation was
complete, Europe had automatically acquired another reason for refusing to
discuss debt restructuring: it would now hit the pockets of European
citizens! And so increasing doses of austerity were administered while
the debt grew larger, forcing creditors
to extend more loans in exchange for even more austerity.
Our government was elected on a
mandate to end this doom loop; to demand debt restructuring and an end to
crippling austerity. Negotiations have reached their much publicized
impasse for a simple reason: our
creditors continue to rule out any tangible debt restructuring while insisting that our
unpayable debt be repaid “parametrically” by the weakest of Greeks,
their children and their grandchildren.
In my first week as
minister for finance I was visited by Jeroen Dijsselbloem, president of the
Eurogroup (the eurozone finance ministers), who put a stark choice to me: accept the bailout’s “logic” and drop any demands for debt
restructuring or your loan agreement will “crash” – the
unsaid repercussion being that Greece’s banks would be boarded up.
Five months of negotiations ensued under conditions of
monetary asphyxiation and an induced bank-run supervised and administered by
the European Central Bank. The writing
was on the wall: unless we capitulated, we would
soon be facing capital controls, quasi-functioning cash machines, a prolonged
bank holiday and, ultimately, Grexit.
The threat of Grexit
has had a brief rollercoaster of a history. In 2010 it put the fear of God in
financiers’ hearts and minds as their banks were replete with Greek debt. Even
in 2012, when Germany’s finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, decided that Grexit’s costs were a worthwhile “investment”
as a way of disciplining France et al, the prospect continued to
scare the living daylights out of almost everyone else
By the time Syriza
won power last January, and as if to confirm our claim that the “bailouts”
had nothing to do with rescuing Greece (and everything to do with ring-fencing
northern Europe), a large majority within the Eurogroup – under the tutelage of
Schäuble – had adopted Grexit either as their preferred outcome or weapon of
choice against our government.
Greeks, rightly, shiver at the thought of amputation from
monetary union. Exiting a common currency is nothing like severing a peg, as
Britain did in 1992,
when Norman Lamont famously sang in the shower the morning sterling quit the
European exchange rate mechanism (ERM). Alas, Greece does not have a currency whose peg with
the euro can be cut. It has the euro – a foreign currency fully administered by
a creditor inimical to restructuring our nation’s unsustainable debt.
To exit, we would
have to create a new currency from scratch. In occupied Iraq, the introduction of new paper money took almost
a year, 20 or so Boeing 747s, the mobilisation of the US military’s might,
three printing firms and hundreds of trucks. In the absence of such support, Grexit would be the
equivalent of announcing a large devaluation more than 18 months in advance: a
recipe for liquidating all Greek capital stock and transferring it abroad by
any means available.
With Grexit reinforcing the ECB-induced bank run, our attempts to put
debt restructuring back on the negotiating table fell on deaf ears.
Time and again we were told that this was a matter for an unspecified future
that would follow the “programme’s successful completion” – a stupendous
Catch-22 since the “programme” could never succeed without a debt restructure.
This weekend brings the climax of the talks as Euclid Tsakalotos, my successor,
strives, again, to put the horse before the cart – to convince
a hostile Eurogroup that debt restructuring is a prerequisite of success for
reforming Greece, not an ex-post reward for it. Why is this so hard to get
across? I see three reasons.
EUROPE DID NOT KNOW
HOW TO RESPOND TO THE FINANCIAL CRISIS. Should it prepare for an expulsion
(Grexit) or a federation?
One is that institutional inertia is hard to beat. A second, that unsustainable debt gives
creditors immense power over debtors – and power, as we know, corrupts even the
finest. But it is the third which
seems to me more pertinent and, indeed, more interesting.
The euro is a hybrid of a fixed exchange-rate regime,
like the 1980s ERM, or the 1930s gold standard, and a state currency. The former relies on the fear of expulsion to
hold together, while state money
involves mechanisms for recycling surpluses between member states (for
instance, a federal budget, common bonds). The eurozone
falls between these stools – it is more than an exchange-rate regime and less
than a state.
And there’s the rub. After the
crisis of 2008/9, Europe
didn’t know how to respond. Should it prepare the ground for at
least one expulsion (that is,
Grexit) to strengthen discipline? Or
move to a federation? So far it has done
neither, its existentialist angst forever rising. Schäuble is convinced that as things stand, he needs a Grexit to
clear the air, one way or another. Suddenly, a permanently
unsustainable Greek public debt, without which the risk of Grexit would fade,
has acquired a new usefulness for Schauble.
What do I mean by that? Based on months of negotiation, my conviction is that the
German finance minister wants Greece to be pushed out of the single currency to
put the fear of God into the French and have them accept his model of a
disciplinarian eurozone.
====
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario