Tag Archives: Greece

Neoliberal union-busting in full swing.CounterpunchEU Imposes Anti-Union Law on GreeceWill Podmore

Taken from a short interview with Greece’s Banking News. According to the IMF, Greece’s debt isn’t manageable in the long-run without being either extended or forgiven. Where do you stand towards this claim? How important is the Greek debt relief? The IMF’s European research staff staff was quite correct in stating some years ago that Greece’s debt was unpayable. The staff was so upset that the head of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, made the bailout loan anyway that they...

When the latest Greek bailout deal between the Greek government and the European Commission/IMF) was concluded on June 16, 2017, I concluded that it was designed to fail. Please read my blog – Latest Greek bailout – a recipe designed to fail. Despite all the statements from the European Commission and the IMF to the contrary, the terms of the deal with the Greek government confirms that these institutions had abandoned any pretense to being interested in serious economic policy. For the...

By Marc Chandler (originally posted at Marc to Market) The investment climate is being shaped by two powerful forces.  First is the very accommodative policy stance. This includes the United States, where despite delivering the fifth rate hike in the cycle, adjusted by headline CPI, remains negative. As the balance sheet has begun being reduced, financial conditions in the US are easier now...

Greece will be in a “non-functional condition” until 2020, predicts the advisor to the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan Yiğit Bulut, who characterizes the Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras as a “tool of the imperialists”. Speaking on the state television programme “Deep Analysis” he gave the example of Greece to show the consequences of imperialism for global political developments.”They sold off everything. The banks have passed into the hands of the Germans. They have been left with...

A recent twitter exchange with some Europhiles who believe that it is better to wait for some, as yet unspecified, incremental reform process for the Eurozone rather than precipitate exit and the restoration of currency sovereignty was summed up for me by one of the tweets from Andrew Watt. In trying to defend the abandonment of sovereignty and make a case for continuing with the so-called reform dialogue, he wrote (October 27, 2017): “Unemployment in “periphery” was v hi before €. Fell...

The announcement by the European Central Bank that it has so far made €7.8bn in profits from its holdings in Greek government debt reveals the true nature of the so-called bailouts of Greek government finances that the EU leaders organised in return for massive austerity measures from 2012 onwards.... Michael Roberts BlogBeware the ECB bearing gifts for GreeksMichael Roberts

In a recent article entitled “Varoufakis and the 2015 debt talks – behind closed doors”, published on the English language site of Kathimerini, Yannis Paleologos is putting forward an innovative new criticism of my 2015 negotiating stance regarding Greece’s public debt. His criticism’s first leg is standard troika-speak, insisting that by pressing for a deep re-structuring of Greece’s public debt I brought “the...

This is a superbly written account of the struggle to alleviate the austerity imposed upon the Greek people by the eurozone. Greece, argues Varoufakis, has been put in a debtors’ prison and robbed of autonomy and dignity for the indefinite future. Critics would argue that he failed as finance minister in 2015 because he was insufficiently politic. More plausibly, he could never have succeeded, such were the...

Extending (again) the extending-and-pretending Eurogroup policy on Greece’s never-ending crisis Back in August 2015, while sitting gloomily in the Greek Parliament during the sad, long night leading to the voting in of the 3rd MoU, I found solace in annotating the MoU’s text. Last night, I felt the need to repeat that wretched ritual once more, this time with the 15th June 2017 Eurogroup statement on Greece. (In...