Ending Greece’s Bleeding

The truth is that Europe’s self-styled technocrats are like medieval doctors who insisted on bleeding their patients — and when their treatment made the patients sicker, demanded even more bleeding.

.. In advance of the referendum, the European Central Bank cut off their access to additional funds, helping to precipitate panic and force the government to impose a bank holiday and capital controls. The central bank now faces an awkward choice: if it resumes normal financing it will as much as admit that the previous freeze was political, but if it doesn’t it will effectively force Greece into introducing a new currency.

Greece’s Debt Burden: The Truth Finally Emerges

As long ago as 2010, when Greece was first bailed out, many knowledgeable observers, including some members of the I.M.F.’s board of directors, worried that Greece would never be able to pay back all of its debts—its total debt burden is about a hundred and seventy five per cent of the country’s G.D.P.—and advocated imposing a haircut on its creditors. Rather than doing this, the European Union, the European Central Bank, and the I.M.F. loaned the Greek government money to pay its creditors, which were mostly European banks, at a hundred cents on the dollar. In the now-famous words of Karl Otto Pöhl, a former head of the Bundesbank, the bailout “was about protecting German banks, but especially the French banks, from debt write-offs.”

.. But they were concerned that writing off some of Greece’s debts would set a precedent for other heavily indebted countries, such as Ireland, Italy, and Portugal. Rather than going down that route, they stuck to the fiction that Greece, if it embraced austerity and structural reform, would eventually be able to pay down all of its loans—a strategy widely known as “extend and pretend.”

.. Greece isn’t going to cut, or reform, or grow it’s way to debt sustainability. Either it will default on virtually all of its loans and adopt a new currency, or it will need debt forgiveness of the sort that Germany enjoyed after the Second World War, when more than half of its loans

Greece’s Sorry Reckoning

Both sides played a game of chicken, and neither was bluffing — the Europeans, led by Germany, were determined to continue imposing austerity; the Greeks were determined to ride their recklessness to the end. The Greeks’ demand for debt relief, and their declarations of restored pride, were seen by creditors as petulance. Instead of working for solutions, both sides sought excuses for failure.