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It is inconceivable for creditors to write off Greek debt

09 June 2015 / 21:06:30  GRReporter
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Its credibility would suffer but the consequences would be removed in a very short time. The European Central Bank is applying the quantitative easing programme worth 60 billion euro per month. This amount actually annuls the consequences of Grexit. As for credibility, the logic that "the black sheep is off the scheme" would certainly prevail. There would be some accusations against Greece, namely that Athens had corrected the statistical data on the state of the economy, etc. The world economy would perceive this as a positive sign of cleansing and a step in the right direction, and it would forget the "Greek issue" after a short while. And Greece would never return to the euro zone.

Do the creditors have different positions on some issues relating to the agreement with Greece?

Yes, there are differences that are not as essential as presented by the government propaganda in Greece. Whatever their differences, they are bound by the agreement that was presented in Berlin after "the meeting of the five." And it states that all have to agree. There is no simpler solution than this. Regardless of what the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission or the European Central Bank are saying, no one of the three partners will act to the detriment of the other. Once they have this common position, any discussion is pointless.

Are the creditors willing to agree to a restructuring of Greek sovereign debt and to what extent?

No, there is no such possibility. Assume that the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund are two companies. The shareholders of one company hold shares in the other. Could the meeting of the board of one company take a decision against the management board of the other, in view of the fact that these are the same people? Of course, it could not.

Is just cannot happen. These speculations are disseminated in Athens and they state that Greece will be able to save itself because creditors have differences with each other, etc. No, there will never be a Greek debt haircut. There is no reason to haircut it. According to the representatives of the European Commission, Greece is earning 8 billion euro a year from the loans it has taken out. Because if it obtained loans directly from financial markets, not at the higher interest rates of today but at the low interest rates of years ago, they would have cost it an extra 8 billion euro.

Moreover, the cost of public debt financing is not as high as claimed by Athens. It is about 3% of GDP per year, whereas the cost of servicing the public debt of Italy is now 4.5% of GDP. If Greece borrowed another 50 billion euro to repay its loans to the International Monetary Fund and to redeem the bonds of the European Central Bank, then the cost of servicing the Greek debt would have been below 1% of GDP. Incidentally, this was the proposal of Lazard consultants to the Greek Ministry of Finance, but also the conception of Wolfgang Schäuble’s appeal to his US counterpart Jack Lew for Washington to provide 50 billion euro to save Greece.

This means the price for the next 25 years is very low. Therefore, the rhetoric about how huge the debt is as well as the cost of servicing it is false dilemmas. The creditors are willing to continue to assist Greece to pay its loans at a very low cost but want it to carry out reforms in return, because if it failed to do so, it would need financial assistance again in 10 years.

What is the attitude towards Alexis Tsipras in Brussels following the denial on the part of Athens that Jean-Claude Juncker had refused to talk to him last Saturday?

The feeling is that he is following a different logic and that he has betrayed them, and that they are doing the right thing for Greece but the personal relations with Tsipras have ended.

And all this despite the fact that the support of Jean-Claude Juncker for him was significant even before the elections and the President of the European Commission thus risked provoking misunderstanding with regard to Prime Minister of the time Antonis Samaras.

Now all that is past. The Greek Prime Minister has lied three times about things relating to Juncker and therefore the personal relations between them have ended.

Tags: PoliticsNegotiations with creditorsGreek debtBrusselsReformsGrexitAlexis TsiprasJean-Claude Juncker
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