LONDON | By Richard Laming | Fixing the problems of the Greek economy is not simply a matter of attending to the public finances and is a task that will take many years. But is not in the nature of the international bond markets to give sovereign debtors that long.
ATHENS | The eurozone and the IMF decided on 8 July to hand Athens a new tranche of aid in exchange for the sacking of 15,000 civil servants. If they want to lose the support of the population for the necessary reform of public services, that’s the best way to go about it, says Panos Panagiotopoulos.
ATHENS | By Giorgios Malouchos at Presseurop | The IMF bailout of Greece has above all allowed its creditors to dodge their responsibilities and guard against contagion. The Greeks should revolt and renegotiate the terms of the loan, writes To Vima.
MADRID | By Antonio Sánchez-Gijón at CapitalMadrid | On May 9 the European Union will deliver Charlemagne Prize to Lithuania’s President Dalia Grybauskaite. The idea is not to reward her as a former EC Commissioner, but as the person who embodies the success of three small countries of Northern Europe out of their deep economic crisis in two years. While the populations of the Mediterranean Europe and France are raised in arms against austerity policies imposed from Brussels and Frankfurt to exit the stagnation and save the euro, two European Baltic nations are looking forward to joining the common currency.
Presseurop.eu | Kostas Onisenko | Victims of the Greek crisis and its consequences, non-European migrants have started to head home. In a centre in Athens, they talk bitterly of the setback that repatriation represents for them.
MADRID | An interview by Tania Suárez | The Greek labyrinth does have an exit, but creditors must acknowledge there are losses to bear. After all, says Hanseatic Brokerhouse’s director Gabriel Montalto, a so-called Grexit would force Germany to assume up to 80 percent of losses.
The Eurogroup recalls that a full staff-level agreement has been reached between Greece and the Troika on updated conditionality programme and that, according to the Troika, Greece has implemented all agreed prior actions.
How will the Greek debt be reduced to bearable levels? There are only two simple solutions. Either Interest payments for the outstanding public debt should be paused for a period of 5 years, or the ECB directly funds any financial needs Greece has.
Constantly struggling to keep up with the austerity imposed by the Troika, Greece has managed to cut public spending much more efficiently than it’s acknowledged. Economic recovery, though, is still nowhere to be seen. The IMF is right to rethink the current policies before it is too late.
Don’t just blame austerity, says policy adviser Manos: Greece’s welfare state has for years been the worst in the OECD at tackling poverty. And it isn’t alone. Estonia, Malta and the Czech Republic have similar levels of food poverty as Greece’s among households with dependent children.