Ελλάδα: Ίδια τραγωδία, διαφορετικό σενάριο (Greece: Same Tragedy, Different Scripts)
(...)
The Greek crisis essentially stems from the same frenzied drive of finance capital to draw profits from the massive indiscriminate extension of credit that led to the implosion of Wall Street
(...)
Like the Third World debt crisis of the early 1980s and the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, the so-called sovereign debt problem of countries like Greece, Europe, Spain, and Portugal is principally a supply-driven crisis, not a demand-driven one.
(...)
If ever there was a crisis created by global finance, Greece is suffering from it right now.
(...)
There are two key reasons why the Greek narrative has become a time-worn cautionary tale of people living beyond their means, rather than a case of financial irresponsibility on the part of bankers and investors
(...)
First of all, financial institutions successfully hijacked the narrative of crisis to serve their own ends. The big banks are now truly worried about the awful state of their balance sheets, impaired as they are by the toxic subprime assets they took on and realizing that they severely overextended their lending operations. The principal way they seek to rebuild their balance sheets is to generate fresh capital by using their debtors as pawns. As the centerpiece of this strategy, the banks seek to persuade the public authorities to bail them out once more, as the authorities did in the first stage of the crisis in the form of rescue funds and a low prime lending rate.
The banks were confident that the dominant Eurozone governments would never allow Greece and the other highly indebted European countries to default because it would lead to the collapse of the euro. By having the markets bet against Greece and raising its cost of borrowing, the banks knew that the Eurozone governments would come out with a bailout package, most of which would go toward servicing the Greek debt to them.
(...)
The second reason for promoting the "living beyond one’s means" narrative in the case of Greece and the other severely indebted countries is to deflect the pressures for tighter financial regulation, which have come from citizens and governments since the start of the global crisis. The banks want to have their cake and eat it too.
(...)
Walden Bello:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/07/15-7
(1)
Ελλάδα:
The Greek crisis essentially stems from the same frenzied drive of finance capital to draw profits from the massive indiscriminate extension of credit that led to the implosion of Wall Street
(...)
Like the Third World debt crisis of the early 1980s and the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, the so-called sovereign debt problem of countries like Greece, Europe, Spain, and Portugal is principally a supply-driven crisis, not a demand-driven one.
(...)
If ever there was a crisis created by global finance, Greece is suffering from it right now.
(...)
There are two key reasons why the Greek narrative has become a time-worn cautionary tale of people living beyond their means, rather than a case of financial irresponsibility on the part of bankers and investors
(...)
First of all, financial institutions successfully hijacked the narrative of crisis to serve their own ends. The big banks are now truly worried about the awful state of their balance sheets, impaired as they are by the toxic subprime assets they took on and realizing that they severely overextended their lending operations. The principal way they seek to rebuild their balance sheets is to generate fresh capital by using their debtors as pawns. As the centerpiece of this strategy, the banks seek to persuade the public authorities to bail them out once more, as the authorities did in the first stage of the crisis in the form of rescue funds and a low prime lending rate.
The banks were confident that the dominant Eurozone governments would never allow Greece and the other highly indebted European countries to default because it would lead to the collapse of the euro. By having the markets bet against Greece and raising its cost of borrowing, the banks knew that the Eurozone governments would come out with a bailout package, most of which would go toward servicing the Greek debt to them.
(...)
The second reason for promoting the "living beyond one’s means" narrative in the case of Greece and the other severely indebted countries is to deflect the pressures for tighter financial regulation, which have come from citizens and governments since the start of the global crisis. The banks want to have their cake and eat it too.
(...)
Walden Bello:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/07/15-7
(1)
Ελλάδα:
Ίδια τραγωδία, διαφορετικό σενάριο
18:57 - Κυρ 12/06/2011, tvxsteam
Οι καφετέριες στην Αθήνα είναι γεμάτες και πλήθη τουριστών συνεχίζουν να επισκέπτονται τον Παρθενώνα και να περιοδεύουν στα νησιά του μυθικού Αιγαία. Όμως κάτω από την καλοκαιρινή επιφάνεια κρύβεται σύγχυση, θυμός και απόγνωση, καθώς η χώρα βυθίζεται στη χειρότερη οικονομική κρίση εδώ και δεκαετίες.
Του Walden Bello, COUNTERFIRE.ORG
Η Ελλάδα, η μικρή Ελλάδα έχει παρουσιαστεί από τα διεθνή μέσα σαν το επίκεντρο του δεύτερου σταδίου της παγκόσμιας οικονομικής κρίσης, όπως ακριβώς η Γουόλ Στριτ προβλήθηκε ως το σημείο μηδέν του πρώτου της σταδίου. Υπάρχει ωστόσο μια ενδιαφέρουσα διαφορά στα αφηγήματα που πλαισιώνουν αυτά τα δύο επεισόδια.
Δύο αφηγήματα σε σύγκρουση
Η κατάρρευση της Γουόλ Στριτ που διαμορφώθηκε σε παγκόσμια οικονομική κρίση αποδόθηκε στις αρρύθμιστες δραστηριότητες οικονομικών οργανισμών που εφηύραν ιδιαίτερα περίπλοκα (χρηματοπιστωτικά) εργαλεία για να πολλαπλασιάζουν λεφτά με μαγικό τρόπο.
Με την περίπτωση της Ελλάδας ωστόσο η ιστορία είναι κάπως έτσι: η χώρα συσσώρευσε ένα δυσβάσταχτο χρέος προκειμένου να συντηρήσει ένα βιοτικό επίπεδο πέρα από τις δυνατότητές της. Είναι ακριβώς η περίπτωση ενός σπάταλου που τώρα εξαναγκάζεται να σφίξει το ζωνάρι. Βρυξέλλες, Βερολίνο και τράπεζες παρουσιάζονται ως άκαμπτοι πουριτανοί που θα πρέπει τώρα να τιμωρήσουν τους Μεσόγειους ηδονιστές για τον έκλυτο βίο που διήγαν καθώς και γιατί υπέκυψαν στο αμάρτημα της υπερηφάνειας φιλοξενώντας τους δαπανηρούς Ολυμπιακούς τους 2004.
Η τιμωρία έρχεται στη μορφή ενός προγράμματος ΕΕ –ΔΝΤ που αυξανει τον ΦΠΑ σε 23%, μεταθέτει την ηλικία συνταξιοδότησης στα 65 για τους άντρες και για τις γυναίκες, προβαίνει σε δραστικές περικοπές σε συντάξεις και μισθούς τους δημοσίου και ελαχιστοποιεί πρακτικές που προωθούν την εργασιακή ασφάλεια. Τα «γυμνάσια» αυτά έχουν ως φαινομενικό στόχο να περιορίσουν δραστικά το βιοτικό επίπεδο και να καταφέρουν τους κακομαθημένους Έλληνες να ζουν με τα μέσα που διαθέτουν.
Υπάρχουν σαφώς κάποια ψήγματα αλήθειας στη θεωρία περί ευμάρειας αλλά κατά βάση είναι λανθασμένη.
Η ελληνική κρίση προκύπτει ουσιαστικά από την απουσία ρυθμιστικών μηχανισμών του χρηματιστικού κεφαλαίου που είχαν νωρίτερα οδηγήσει στη φούσκα της Γουόλ Στριτ. Με άλλα λόγια δημιουργήθηκε κατά κύριο λόγο από την τρελή κούρσα του χρηματιστικού κεφαλαίου που επεδίωκε να κερδοσκοπήσει από την αδιάκριτη, μαζική επέκταση του χρέους. Η ελληνική κρίσει εμπίπτει στο πρότυπο που καταγράφεται από την Carmen Reinhart και τον Kenneth Rogoff με τίτλο «Αυτή τη Φορά είναι Αλλιώς: Οκτώ Αιώνες Οικονομικής Παραφροσύνης»:
Οι περίοδοι που χαρακτηρίζονται από φρενίτιδα δανεισμού ακολουθούνται αναγκαστικά από κρατική χρεωκοπία ή σχεδόν χρεωκοπία. Όπως και η κρίση χρέους του τρίτου κόσμου στις αρχές της δεκαετίας του '80, όπως η ασιατική οικονομική κρίση στα τέλη της δεκαετίας του '90, η αποκαλούμενη ως «κρίση κρατικού χρέους» (sovereign debt crisis) των χωρών του ευρωπαϊκού νότου είναι πρωταρχικά μια κρίση προσφοράς κι όχι μια κρίση ζήτησης.
Υπολογίζεται ότι στην κούρσα κερδοφορίας από υπηρεσίες δανεισμού οι ευρωπαϊκές τράπεζες έριξαν 2,5 τρις δολάρια σ’ αυτές που σήμερα πλέον αποτελούν τις πιο προβληματικές ευρωπαϊκές οικονομίες: της Ιρλανδίας, της Ελλάδας, του Βελγίου, της Πορτογαλίας και της Ισπανίας. Γερμανικές και Γαλλικές τράπεζες κατέχουν περί το 70% του ύψους 400 δις δολαρίων ελληνικού χρέους. Οι γερμανικές τράπεζες υπήρξαν οι βασικοί αγοραστές τοξικών subprime assets προερχόμενων από αμερικανικά χρηματοπιστωτικά ιδρύματα και εφάρμοσαν την ίδια απουσία επιλεκτικότητας στην αγορά ελληνικών κρατικών ομολόγων. Από την πλευρά τους οι γαλλικές τράπεζες από το ξέσπασμα της κρίσης και μετά , σύμφωνα με την Τράπεζα Διεθνών Διακανονισμών, αναφέρει το περιοδικό Newsweek, αύξησαν το δανεισμό προς την Ελλάδα κατά 23%, την Ισπανία 11% και την Πορτογαλία 26%.
Δεν ήταν όμως αποκλειστικά Ευρωπαίοι οι πρωταγωνιστές στο δράμα της ελληνικής πιστωτικής κρίσης. Η Goldman Sachs, το ισχυρό πρόσωπο της Wall Street, υπέδειξε στις ελληνικές οικονομικές αρχές τον τρόπο με τον οποίο οικονομικά εργαλεία γνωστά ως παράγωγα (derivatives) μπορούσαν να χρησιμοποιηθούν για να «εξαφανίσουν» large chunks of greek βελτιώνοντας έτσι την εικόνα των κρατικών λογαριασμών προς τους τραπεζίτες και ικανοποιώντας τον διακαή τους πόθο για περεταίρω δανεισμό. Στη συνέχεια η ίδια ακριβώς εταιρία έκανε πλήρη στροφή και εισάγοντας εμπορικά παράγωγα γνωστά ως «credit default swaps, ποντάρισε στην πιθανή χρεοκοπία Αδυναμία αποπληρωμής της Ελλάδας, ανεβάζοντας το κόστος τραπεζικού δανεισμού για τη χώρα αλλά πετυχαίνοντας ένα αρκετά περιποιημένο κέρδος για την ίδια.
Αν υπήρξε ποτέ μία κρίση που προκλήθηκε από τις παγκόσμιες συναλλαγές δεν είναι άλλη από την ελληνική.
Το ερώτημα είναι λοιπόν το εξής: γιατί η ελληνική περίπτωση δεν αναφέρεται σαν μια περίπτωση γέννημα θρέμμα του φρενήρους καιροσκοπισμού του διεθνούς χρηματοπιστωτικού κεφαλαίου και αντίθετα παρουσιάζεται ως ξεπερασμένη ιστοριούλα – φόβητρο ενός λαού που υπερέβη τα υλικά μέσα διαβίωσής του; Δύο είναι οι κύριοι λόγοι.
Ο πρώτος αφορά το πετυχημένο «καπέλωμα» της ιστορίας της κρίσης από τα οικονομικά ιδρύματα για ίδια οφέλη. Οι μεγάλες τράπεζες ανησυχούν πλέον πραγματικά για την άθλια κατάσταση των ισολογισμών τους, εξασθενημένες καθώς είναι από τις τοξικές επενδύσεις που οικειοποιήθηκαν, και καθώς συνειδητοποιούν ότι ξεπέρασαν τα όρια με τις δανειοδοτικές τους δραστηριότητες. Ο βασικός μηχανισμός αναδιαμόρφωσης των ισολογισμών τους είναι η παραγωγή ζεστού κεφαλαίου χρησιμοποιώντας τους οφειλέτες σαν ενέχυρο. Στο επίκεντρο αυτής της στρατηγικής, οι δημόσιες αρχές θα κληθούν ακόμη μία φορά να ξελασπώσουν τις τράπεζες, όπως ακριβώς έκαναν μέσα από το πακέτο χρηματοδότησης και τα χαμηλά επιτόκια δανεισμού στην πρώτη φάση της κρίσης.
Πώς θα το πετύχουν αυτό; Η αλήθεια είναι οι τράπεζες δεν πήραν ποτέ στα σοβαρά τον κίνδυνο πτώχευσης της Ελλάδας ή των άλλων υπερχρεωμένων Ευρωπαϊκών κρατών, καθώς οι κυρίαρχες κυβερνήσεις της Ευρωζώνης δεν θα επέτρεπαν ποτέ την κατάρρευση του Ευρώ στην οποία θα οδηγούσε η πτώχευση. Βάζοντας όμως τις αγορές να στοιχηματίσουν εναντίον της Ελλάδας και ανεβάζοντας το κόστος δανεισμού, οι τράπεζες γνώριζαν ότι οι κυβερνήσεις της Ευρωζώνης θα κατέληγαν σε ένα πακέτο λύσης, το μεγαλύτερο μέρος του οποίου θα κατευθυνόταν στην εξυπηρέτηση του Ελληνικού χρέους. Ο πολυδιαφημισμένος μηχανισμός στήριξης της Ελλάδας που αντιστοιχεί σε ένα πακέτο 110 δις Ευρώ, προερχόμενων από τις ισχυρές οικονομίες της Ευρωζώνης και το ΔΝΤ, πρόκειται κατά ένα μεγάλο μέρος να διοχετευθεί στη διάσωση των τραπεζών από τις συνέπειες της δικής τους ανεύθυνης και άνευ κανονισμών φρενίτιδας δανεισμού.
Είναι το ίδιο παλιό παιχνίδι αξιοπιστίας – τότε γνωστό ως δομική προσαρμογή – που παίχτηκε στις χρεωμένες αναπτυσσόμενες χώρες κατά τη διάρκεια της κρίσης χρέους τους Τρίτου Κόσμου στη δεκαετία του ’80 και σε Ταϊλάνδη και Ινδονησία κατά την ασιατική οικονομική κρίση του ’90, δύο επεισοδίων που ακολούθησαν πάρτι δανεισμού από τράπεζες του Βορρά και κερδοσκόπους: ρίξε το φταίξιμο στα θύματα κατηγορώντας τους ότι ζουν πέρα από τις δυνατότητές τους, επιστράτευσε δημόσιους φορείς να σε σώσουν προκαταβολικά με χρήμα και ανέθεσε στον κόσμο το βαρύ φορτίο της αποπληρωμής του δανείου θυσιάζοντας ένα τεράστιο κομμάτι του τρέχοντος και μελλοντικού τους εισοδήματος για πληρωμές στους δανειοδοτικούς οργανισμούς.
Δεν θα ήταν αξιοπερίεργο αν παρόμοια μαζικά πακέτα στήριξης ύψους πολλών δισεκατομμυρίων προετοιμάζονται αυτή τη στιγμή για τράπεζες που ξεπέρασαν τις δυνατότητές του στην Ισπανία, την Πορτογαλία και την Ιρλανδία.
Ρίχνοντας αλλού το φταίξιμο
Ο δεύτερος λόγος για την προώθηση του ιδεολογήματος του να ζει κανείς πέρα από τις δυνατότητές του στην περίπτωση της Ελλάδας και τις άλλες σοβαρά χρεωμένες χώρες είναι για να εκτρέψει τις πιέσεις για πιο σφικτά ρυθμιστικά πλαίσια στην οικονομία, πιέσεις προερχόμενες από πολίτες και κυβερνήσεις ήδη από το ξεκίνημα της παγκόσμιας κρίσης. Η λογική των τραπεζών είναι «και την πίτα ολόκληρη και το σκύλο χορτάτο». Στην πρώτη φάση της κρίσης εξασφάλισαν πακέτα διάσωσης αλλά δεν προτίθενται να σεβαστούν αυτό που οι κυβερνήσεις είπαν στους πολίτες ότι αποτελούσε ένα βασικό μέρος της συμφωνίας: την ενδυνάμωση των ρυθμιστικών μηχανισμών στην οικονομία. Οι κυβερνήσεις από τις ΗΠΑ μέχρι την Κίνα και την Ελλάδα κατέφυγαν σε μαζικά προγράμματα τόνωσης για να συγκρατήσουν την κατάρρευση της πραγματικής οικονομίας κατά την πρώτη φάση της οικονομικής κρίσης. Προβάλλοντας μια ανάλυση που αντί να εστιάζει στην απουσία ρυθμιστικών μηχανισμών στρέφει απεναντίας την προσοχή στις μαζικές κρατικές σπατάλες ως πρόβλημα – κλειδί στην παγκόσμια οικονομία, οι τράπεζες επιδιώκουν να προλάβουν την επιβολή ενός σκληρού ρυθμιστικού πλαισίου.
Με τον τρόπο αυτό όμως παίζουν με τη φωτιά.
Πηγή:
counterfire.org
Η μετάφραση έγινε από τον Σωτήρη Λάκη, μέλος του μεταφραστικού project του tvxs.
ΠΗΓΗ ΤΟΥ ΚΕΙΜΕΝΟΥ ΤΗΣ ΑΝΑΡΤΗΣΕΩΣ Η ΙΣΤΟΣΕΛΙΔΑ:
http://tvxs.gr/
(2)
Greece: Same Tragedy, Different Scripts
Thursday, 15 July 2010
Cafés are full in Athens, and droves of tourists still visit the Parthenon and go island-hopping in the fabled Aegean. But beneath the summery surface, there is confusion, anger, and despair as this country plunges into its worst economic crisis in decades.
The global media has presented Greece, tiny Greece, as the epicenter of the second stage of the global financial crisis, much as it portrayed Wall Street as ground zero of the first stage.
Yet there is an interesting difference in the narratives surrounding these two episodes.
Narratives in Conflict
The unregulated activities of financial institutions, which created ever more complex instruments to magically multiply money, created the Wall Street crash that morphed into the global financial crisis.
With Greece, however, the narrative goes this way: This country piled up an unsustainable debt load to build a welfare state it could not afford, and is now the spendthrift that must tighten its belt. Brussels, Berlin, and the banks are the dour Puritans now exacting penance from the Mediterranean hedonists for living beyond their means and committing the sin of pride by hosting the costly 2004 Olympics.
This penance comes in the form of a European Union-International Monetary Fund program that will increase the country’s value-added tax to 23 percent, raise the retirement age to 65 for both men and women, make deep cuts in pensions and public sector wages, and eliminate practices promoting job security. The ostensible aim of the exercise is to radically slim down the welfare state and get the spoiled Greeks to live within their means.
Although the welfare-state narrative contains some nuggets of truth, it is fundamentally flawed. The Greek crisis essentially stems from the same frenzied drive of finance capital to draw profits from the massive indiscriminate extension of credit that led to the implosion of Wall Street. The Greek crisis falls into the pattern traced by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff in their book This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly: This Periods of frenzied speculative lending are inexorably followed by government or sovereign debt defaults, or near defaults. Like the Third World debt crisis of the early 1980s and the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, the so-called sovereign debt problem of countries like Greece, Europe, Spain, and Portugal is principally a supply-driven crisis, not a demand-driven one.
In their drive to raise more and more profits from lending, Europe’s banks poured an estimated $2.5 trillion into what are now the most troubled European economies: Ireland, Greece, Belgium, Portugal, and Spain. German and French banks hold 70 percent of Greece’s $400 billion debt. German banks were great buyers of toxic subprime assets from U.S. financial institutions, and they applied the same lack of discrimination to buying Greek government bonds. For their part French banks, according to the Bank of International Settlements, increased their lending to Greece by 23 percent, to Spain by 11 percent, and to Portugal by 26 percent.
The frenzied Greek credit scene featured not only European financial actors. Wall Street powerhouse Goldman Sachs showed Greek financial authorities how financial instruments known as derivatives could be used to make large chunks of Greek debt “disappear,” thus making the national accounts look good to bankers eager to lend more. Then the very same agency turned around and, engaging in derivatives trading known as “credit default swaps,” bet on the possibility that Greece would default, raising the country’s cost of borrowing from the banks but making a tidy profit for itself.
If ever there was a crisis created by global finance, Greece is suffering from it right now.
Hijacking the Narrative
There are two key reasons why the Greek narrative has become a time-worn cautionary tale of people living beyond their means, rather than a case of financial irresponsibility on the part of bankers and investors.
First of all, financial institutions successfully hijacked the narrative of crisis to serve their own ends. The big banks are now truly worried about the awful state of their balance sheets, impaired as they are by the toxic subprime assets they took on and realizing that they severely overextended their lending operations. The principal way they seek to rebuild their balance sheets is to generate fresh capital by using their debtors as pawns. As the centerpiece of this strategy, the banks seek to persuade the public authorities to bail them out once more, as the authorities did in the first stage of the crisis in the form of rescue funds and a low prime lending rate.
The banks were confident that the dominant Eurozone governments would never allow Greece and the other highly indebted European countries to default because it would lead to the collapse of the euro. By having the markets bet against Greece and raising its cost of borrowing, the banks knew that the Eurozone governments would come out with a bailout package, most of which would go toward servicing the Greek debt to them. Promoted as rescuing Greece, the massive 110-billion-euro package, put together by the dominant Eurozone governments and the IMF, will largely go toward rescuing the banks from their irresponsible, unregulated lending frenzy.
The banks and international financial institutions played this same old confidence game on developing country debtors during the Third World debt crisis of the 1980s, and on Thailand and Indonesia during the Asian financial crisis of the 1990s. The same austerity measures — then known as structural adjustment — followed lending binges from northern banks and speculators. And the scenario played out the same way: Pin the blame on the victims by characterizing them as living beyond their means, get public agencies to rescue you with money upfront, and stick the people with the terrible task of paying off the loan by committing a massive chunk of their present and future income streams as payments to the lending agencies.
No doubt the authorities are preparing similarly massive multibillion-euro rescue packages for the banks that overextended themselves in Spain, Portugal, and Ireland.
Shifting the Blame
The second reason for promoting the "living beyond one’s means" narrative in the case of Greece and the other severely indebted countries is to deflect the pressures for tighter financial regulation, which have come from citizens and governments since the start of the global crisis. The banks want to have their cake and eat it too. They secured bailout funds from governments in the first phase of the crisis, but don't want to honor what governments told their citizens was an essential part of the deal: the strengthening of financial regulation.
Governments, from the United States to China and Greece, had resorted to massive stimulus programs to keep the real economy from collapsing during the first phase of the financial crisis. By promoting a narrative that moves the spotlight from lack of financial regulation to this massive government spending as the key problem of the global economy, the banks seek to forestall the imposition of a tough regulatory regime.
But this is playing with fire. Nobel Prize laureate Paul Krugman and others have warned that if this narrative is successful, the lack of new stimulus programs and tough banking regulations will result in a double-dip recession, if not a full-blown depression. Unfortunately, as the recent G-20 meeting in Toronto suggests, governments in Europe and the United States are caving in to the short-sighted agenda of the banks, who have the backing of unreconstructed neoliberal ideologues that continue to see the activist, interventionist state as the fundamental problem. These ideologues believe that a deep recession and even a depression is the natural process by which an economy stabilizes itself, and that Keynesian spending to avert a collapse will only delay the inevitable.
Resistance: Will It Make a Difference?
The Greeks are not taking all this lying down. Massive protests greeted the ratification of the EU-IMF package by the Greek parliament on July 8. In an earlier and much larger protest on May 5, 400,000 people turned out in Athens in the biggest demonstration since the fall of the military dictatorship in 1974. Yet, street protests seem to do little to avert the social catastrophe that will unfold with the EU-IMF program. The economy is set to contract by 4 percent in 2010. According to Alexis Tsipras, president of the left parliamentary coalition Synapsismos, the unemployment rate will likely rise from 15 to 20 percent in two years, with the rate among young people expected to hit 30 percent.
As for poverty, a recent joint survey by Kapa Research and the London School of Economics found that, even before the current crisis, close to a third of Greece’s 11 million people lived close to the poverty line. This process of creating a "third world" within Greece will only be accelerated by the Brussels-IMF adjustment program.
Ironically, this adjustment is being presided over by a Socialist government headed by George Papandreou voted into office last October to reverse the corruption of the previous conservative administration and the ill effects of its economic policies. There is resistance within Papandreou’s party PASOK to the EU-IMF plan, admits the party’s international secretary Paulina Lampsa. But the overwhelming sense among the party’s parliamentary contingent is TINA, as Margaret Thatcher famously put it: “there is no alternative.”
The Consequences of Compliance
Faced with the program’s savage consequences, an increasing number of Greeks are talking about adopting a strategy of threatening default or a radical unilateral reduction of debt. Such an approach could be coordinated, says Tsipras, with Europe’s other debt-burdened countries, like Portugal and Spain. Here Argentina may provide a model: it gave its creditors a memorable haircut in 2003 by paying only 25 cents for every dollar it owed. Not only did Argentina get away with it, but the resources that would otherwise have left the country as debt service was channeled into the domestic economy, triggering an average annual economic growth rate of 10 percent between 2003 and 2008.
The “Argentine Solution” is certainly fraught with risk. But the consequences of surrender are painfully clear, if we examine the records of countries that submitted to IMF adjustment. Forking over 25 to 30 percent of the government budget yearly to foreign creditors, the Philippines in the mid-1980s entered a decade of stagnation from which it has never recovered and which condemned it to a permanent poverty rate of over 30 percent. Squeezed by draconian adjustment measures, Mexico was sucked into two decades of continuing economic crisis, with consequences such as the pervasive narcotics traffic that has brought it to the brink of being a failed state. The current state of virtual class war in Thailand can be traced partly to the political fallout of the economic sufferings of the IMF austerity program imposed on that country a decade ago.
The Brussels-IMF adjustment of Greece shows that finance capitalism in the throes of crisis no longer respects the North-South divide. The cynics would say, “Welcome to the Third World, Greece.”
But this is no time for cynicism. Rather, it’s a key moment for global solidarity.
We’re all in this together now.
http://www.towardfreedom.com/global-news/2029-greece-same-tragedy-different-scripts
Walden Bello is a member of the House of Representatives of the Philippines, representing the party-list Akbayan. He is also the author of Food Wars (London: Verso, 2009). He is columnist for Foreign Policy In Focus and can be reached at
waldenbello@yahoo.com
(Οι''υπογραμμίσεις'' -χρώμα,μέγεθος γραμματοσειράς και οι εικονογραφήσεις - με εικόνες από το World Wide Web-στις αναρτήσεις γίνονται με ευθύνη του blogger'')
(2)
Greece: Same Tragedy, Different Scripts
Thursday, 15 July 2010
Cafés are full in Athens, and droves of tourists still visit the Parthenon and go island-hopping in the fabled Aegean. But beneath the summery surface, there is confusion, anger, and despair as this country plunges into its worst economic crisis in decades.
The global media has presented Greece, tiny Greece, as the epicenter of the second stage of the global financial crisis, much as it portrayed Wall Street as ground zero of the first stage.
Yet there is an interesting difference in the narratives surrounding these two episodes.
Narratives in Conflict
The unregulated activities of financial institutions, which created ever more complex instruments to magically multiply money, created the Wall Street crash that morphed into the global financial crisis.
With Greece, however, the narrative goes this way: This country piled up an unsustainable debt load to build a welfare state it could not afford, and is now the spendthrift that must tighten its belt. Brussels, Berlin, and the banks are the dour Puritans now exacting penance from the Mediterranean hedonists for living beyond their means and committing the sin of pride by hosting the costly 2004 Olympics.
This penance comes in the form of a European Union-International Monetary Fund program that will increase the country’s value-added tax to 23 percent, raise the retirement age to 65 for both men and women, make deep cuts in pensions and public sector wages, and eliminate practices promoting job security. The ostensible aim of the exercise is to radically slim down the welfare state and get the spoiled Greeks to live within their means.
Although the welfare-state narrative contains some nuggets of truth, it is fundamentally flawed. The Greek crisis essentially stems from the same frenzied drive of finance capital to draw profits from the massive indiscriminate extension of credit that led to the implosion of Wall Street. The Greek crisis falls into the pattern traced by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff in their book This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly: This Periods of frenzied speculative lending are inexorably followed by government or sovereign debt defaults, or near defaults. Like the Third World debt crisis of the early 1980s and the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, the so-called sovereign debt problem of countries like Greece, Europe, Spain, and Portugal is principally a supply-driven crisis, not a demand-driven one.
In their drive to raise more and more profits from lending, Europe’s banks poured an estimated $2.5 trillion into what are now the most troubled European economies: Ireland, Greece, Belgium, Portugal, and Spain. German and French banks hold 70 percent of Greece’s $400 billion debt. German banks were great buyers of toxic subprime assets from U.S. financial institutions, and they applied the same lack of discrimination to buying Greek government bonds. For their part French banks, according to the Bank of International Settlements, increased their lending to Greece by 23 percent, to Spain by 11 percent, and to Portugal by 26 percent.
The frenzied Greek credit scene featured not only European financial actors. Wall Street powerhouse Goldman Sachs showed Greek financial authorities how financial instruments known as derivatives could be used to make large chunks of Greek debt “disappear,” thus making the national accounts look good to bankers eager to lend more. Then the very same agency turned around and, engaging in derivatives trading known as “credit default swaps,” bet on the possibility that Greece would default, raising the country’s cost of borrowing from the banks but making a tidy profit for itself.
If ever there was a crisis created by global finance, Greece is suffering from it right now.
Hijacking the Narrative
There are two key reasons why the Greek narrative has become a time-worn cautionary tale of people living beyond their means, rather than a case of financial irresponsibility on the part of bankers and investors.
First of all, financial institutions successfully hijacked the narrative of crisis to serve their own ends. The big banks are now truly worried about the awful state of their balance sheets, impaired as they are by the toxic subprime assets they took on and realizing that they severely overextended their lending operations. The principal way they seek to rebuild their balance sheets is to generate fresh capital by using their debtors as pawns. As the centerpiece of this strategy, the banks seek to persuade the public authorities to bail them out once more, as the authorities did in the first stage of the crisis in the form of rescue funds and a low prime lending rate.
The banks were confident that the dominant Eurozone governments would never allow Greece and the other highly indebted European countries to default because it would lead to the collapse of the euro. By having the markets bet against Greece and raising its cost of borrowing, the banks knew that the Eurozone governments would come out with a bailout package, most of which would go toward servicing the Greek debt to them. Promoted as rescuing Greece, the massive 110-billion-euro package, put together by the dominant Eurozone governments and the IMF, will largely go toward rescuing the banks from their irresponsible, unregulated lending frenzy.
The banks and international financial institutions played this same old confidence game on developing country debtors during the Third World debt crisis of the 1980s, and on Thailand and Indonesia during the Asian financial crisis of the 1990s. The same austerity measures — then known as structural adjustment — followed lending binges from northern banks and speculators. And the scenario played out the same way: Pin the blame on the victims by characterizing them as living beyond their means, get public agencies to rescue you with money upfront, and stick the people with the terrible task of paying off the loan by committing a massive chunk of their present and future income streams as payments to the lending agencies.
No doubt the authorities are preparing similarly massive multibillion-euro rescue packages for the banks that overextended themselves in Spain, Portugal, and Ireland.
Shifting the Blame
The second reason for promoting the "living beyond one’s means" narrative in the case of Greece and the other severely indebted countries is to deflect the pressures for tighter financial regulation, which have come from citizens and governments since the start of the global crisis. The banks want to have their cake and eat it too. They secured bailout funds from governments in the first phase of the crisis, but don't want to honor what governments told their citizens was an essential part of the deal: the strengthening of financial regulation.
Governments, from the United States to China and Greece, had resorted to massive stimulus programs to keep the real economy from collapsing during the first phase of the financial crisis. By promoting a narrative that moves the spotlight from lack of financial regulation to this massive government spending as the key problem of the global economy, the banks seek to forestall the imposition of a tough regulatory regime.
But this is playing with fire. Nobel Prize laureate Paul Krugman and others have warned that if this narrative is successful, the lack of new stimulus programs and tough banking regulations will result in a double-dip recession, if not a full-blown depression. Unfortunately, as the recent G-20 meeting in Toronto suggests, governments in Europe and the United States are caving in to the short-sighted agenda of the banks, who have the backing of unreconstructed neoliberal ideologues that continue to see the activist, interventionist state as the fundamental problem. These ideologues believe that a deep recession and even a depression is the natural process by which an economy stabilizes itself, and that Keynesian spending to avert a collapse will only delay the inevitable.
Resistance: Will It Make a Difference?
The Greeks are not taking all this lying down. Massive protests greeted the ratification of the EU-IMF package by the Greek parliament on July 8. In an earlier and much larger protest on May 5, 400,000 people turned out in Athens in the biggest demonstration since the fall of the military dictatorship in 1974. Yet, street protests seem to do little to avert the social catastrophe that will unfold with the EU-IMF program. The economy is set to contract by 4 percent in 2010. According to Alexis Tsipras, president of the left parliamentary coalition Synapsismos, the unemployment rate will likely rise from 15 to 20 percent in two years, with the rate among young people expected to hit 30 percent.
As for poverty, a recent joint survey by Kapa Research and the London School of Economics found that, even before the current crisis, close to a third of Greece’s 11 million people lived close to the poverty line. This process of creating a "third world" within Greece will only be accelerated by the Brussels-IMF adjustment program.
Ironically, this adjustment is being presided over by a Socialist government headed by George Papandreou voted into office last October to reverse the corruption of the previous conservative administration and the ill effects of its economic policies. There is resistance within Papandreou’s party PASOK to the EU-IMF plan, admits the party’s international secretary Paulina Lampsa. But the overwhelming sense among the party’s parliamentary contingent is TINA, as Margaret Thatcher famously put it: “there is no alternative.”
The Consequences of Compliance
Faced with the program’s savage consequences, an increasing number of Greeks are talking about adopting a strategy of threatening default or a radical unilateral reduction of debt. Such an approach could be coordinated, says Tsipras, with Europe’s other debt-burdened countries, like Portugal and Spain. Here Argentina may provide a model: it gave its creditors a memorable haircut in 2003 by paying only 25 cents for every dollar it owed. Not only did Argentina get away with it, but the resources that would otherwise have left the country as debt service was channeled into the domestic economy, triggering an average annual economic growth rate of 10 percent between 2003 and 2008.
The “Argentine Solution” is certainly fraught with risk. But the consequences of surrender are painfully clear, if we examine the records of countries that submitted to IMF adjustment. Forking over 25 to 30 percent of the government budget yearly to foreign creditors, the Philippines in the mid-1980s entered a decade of stagnation from which it has never recovered and which condemned it to a permanent poverty rate of over 30 percent. Squeezed by draconian adjustment measures, Mexico was sucked into two decades of continuing economic crisis, with consequences such as the pervasive narcotics traffic that has brought it to the brink of being a failed state. The current state of virtual class war in Thailand can be traced partly to the political fallout of the economic sufferings of the IMF austerity program imposed on that country a decade ago.
The Brussels-IMF adjustment of Greece shows that finance capitalism in the throes of crisis no longer respects the North-South divide. The cynics would say, “Welcome to the Third World, Greece.”
But this is no time for cynicism. Rather, it’s a key moment for global solidarity.
We’re all in this together now.
http://www.towardfreedom.com/global-news/2029-greece-same-tragedy-different-scripts
Walden Bello is a member of the House of Representatives of the Philippines, representing the party-list Akbayan. He is also the author of Food Wars (London: Verso, 2009). He is columnist for Foreign Policy In Focus and can be reached at
waldenbello@yahoo.com
(Οι''υπογραμμίσεις'' -χρώμα,μέγεθος γραμματοσειράς και οι εικονογραφήσεις - με εικόνες από το World Wide Web-στις αναρτήσεις γίνονται με ευθύνη του blogger'')