as you'll find in the Guardian.
Another source says that Prof Arweiller of Paris
was talking with a BIG international money
man, like Soros perhaps, who told her that Greece
will have a government at least until the
German elections. After that, it's all open.
Here's the review:
In a few words: Greece is still in freefall
checkit: Guardian
Talk
of recovery in Greece is premature – and all about justifying austerity
Bank
bosses and politicians are trying to convince the world that Greece is on the
mend – but this boosterism is all about justifying the shock therapy imposed on
the eurozone
Aditya Chakrabortty
Monday 3 June 2013 19.59
BST
Perhaps
you remember reading about a basket case called Greece. The first domino to
fall in the eurozone crisis, it was officially broke and only kept afloat by
hundreds of billions in euros from Europe and the IMF. To secure the loans,
Athens had to slash spending, lay off or cut pay for thousands of public
servants and flog state assets. The result was social uproar, political turmoil
and economic collapse. Hundreds of thousands of Greeks took to the streets. The
country faced ejection from the euro, what economists drolly dubbed a
"Grexit". In short, it was in a deep hole. But if that's your image
of Greece then you need to update it: that's so spring/summer 2012.
Over
the past few weeks, Athens' top brass have been trying to convince the world
that happy days are here again. Prime minister Antonis Samaras now talks of the
Greek "success story". The boss of the central bank and the finance
minister say Greece has turned a corner. Editorialists in the national press
and parts of the international financial press dutifully nod their assent. And
those with Greek or European assets to sell clap along: "Forget Grexit –
it could be Greecovery instead," ran one particularly bone-headed
"research" note I received on Friday.
What's
at stake here is a much bigger prize than whether an economy worth 2% of
Europe's annual GDP really is on the mend. It's about justifying the shock
therapy imposed on distressed members of the eurozone.
This
was frankly put by Maria Paola Toschi, a market strategist at JP Morgan, in the
FT last week. "If Greece can present itself as a recovering economy,
having taken the medicine of fiscal austerity and supply-side reform, then the
reform agenda of the European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund will
be given a further boost."
If
the elites of Europe and Washington can claim to have "healed"
Greece, then they can shrug off criticisms of eurozone austerity. And they can
also defend an economic model that just three years ago looked as if it had
crashed into a wall.
Yet
the exhibits the boosters are using do not a case make. Athens shares doubled
in the past year? Cheap money from central banks and investors desperate for
returns can play funny tricks. Wages have fallen? Yes, but the business
investment that was meant to follow on
from that hasn't materialised. The public finances are back in some kind of
order? Taking an axe to the welfare state and public services will do that;
still, few think Athens could go a day outside the sovereign version of
debtor's jail.
And
no one is seriously disputing that the economy remains badly sick; the OECD
predicts Greece will face its seventh year of recession in a row in 2014. More
than one in four Greeks are out of a job; of young Greeks, nearly two in three.
Around 60% of those out of work haven't been employed in more than a year.
According to a recent piece by Nick Malkoutzis and Yiannis Mouzakis for
Ekathimerini, there are 400,000 families in Greece without a single
breadwinner.
Although
I was one of those who opposed the austerity imposed in Greece from the outset,
I would far rather have been proved wrong. As someone who reported from Athens
on a few occasions in 2011, and who has a number of Greek friends, I'd like to
see them flourishing.
As
it is, the most that can be said for the elusive recovery is that Germany and
the rest of Europe have decided to keep Athens in the single currency and to
keep supplying it with euros. From that has come a measure of financial
stability which has attracted investors. The silent run on the banks, with savers pulling out their money, has
stopped; but the financial institutions now function more like deposit vaults
than dispensers of credit. And there have been some important cultural and
institutional changes, as fund manager Jason Manolopoulos points out. Before
the crisis, the government didn't know
how many civil servants it employed; now it does. And, should you wish to
trade in the middle of a depression, it has got easier and cheaper to set up a business.
But
pit those gains against the near-collapse
of the health system, the rise of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn and the clampdown on
investigative journalists such as Kostas Vaxevanis, persecuted for
publishing a list of super-rich tax
dodgers.
While
the economy remains catatonic and civil society is in crisis, all such
boosterism amounts to is a 21st-century version of claiming the operation was
successful; it's just a shame the patient died. It's a more dramatic variant of
something George Osborne and the austerity crowd are trying in the UK, too: to define down what success looks like.
Two
summers ago, I sat with economist Yanis Varoufakis
on his balcony overlooking the Acropolis, and asked him to sum up the outlook
for Greece. "It's in freefall."
Last night, I asked him the same question. "It's still in freefall."
Then
he told me a story. Last year, his book
The Global Minotaur was a bestseller in Greece, ahead even of Fifty Shades of
Grey. But, he said, he had not received a cent in royalties. Why not? His publisher hadn't received any money
from the bookshops, which were all bust. Rather than chase them, put
booksellers out of business and finally kiss goodbye to getting any money, the
publisher preferred to leave it be. So the shops, the imprint and the author all got by on nothing.
That
sweet little story of economic inertia seems to me to say a lot.
