Midnight at the oasis

It’s a measure of the absurd situation that Greece and its lenders have got themselves into that it’s highly doubtful whether there is a single Greek MP or European official that believes the austerity package due to be voted through Parliament around midnight on Wednesday will contribute towards the country’s recovery.

Apart from the dewy-eyed optimists (it would be a shock if there are any of those left), there is unlikely to be anyone who has confidence that the 13.5 billion euros of spending cuts and tax hikes over the next two years will play a part in halting Greece’s incessant decline.

The 2013 budget foresees a primary surplus – the first in over a decade – of 0.4 percent of GDP on the back of the latest measures. While achieving this surplus is one of the milestones on the road to stability, there are serious questions about how it should be achieved. With approximately 9.5 billion euros of measures (equivalent to 4.5 percent of GDP) to be implemented next year, the program of cuts demanded by the troika makes a mockery of assertions by leading economists and even the International Monetary Fund managing director Christine Lagarde that frontloading will end up being destructive, not just counterproductive.

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The Greek patient

“I hope and want Greece to remain in the eurozone,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel said during her visit to Athens last week, before suggesting that everything – from the next bailout instalment to any possible initiatives to pull the country out of its economic tailspin – were dependant on the content of the soon-to-be published report by the troika.

It was hardly an unqualified endorsement of Greece but was absolutely in keeping with the piecemeal approach Europe’s key decision makers have adopted during this crisis. They’ve hooked Greece up to the IV while they try to find a cure for the illness ailing the whole of the eurozone. As the days roll on, the next drip – the troika review – takes on paramount importance. It has become a matter of life and death. So, it should be of urgent concern to all those involved that at this crucial juncture, the troika’s medical credentials are in serious doubt.

Our age of extremes

Historian Eric Hobsbawm, who died at the age of 95 on Monday, had the advantage of living through many of the momentous events he wrote so eloquently about. But his strength as a chronicler of the world’s major turning points was not derived just from his firsthand experience. It was Hobsbawm’s fine ability to understand and explain the context and consequence of developments that made him stand apart as one of the world’s great historians.

The analysis provided by Hobsbawm in the masterful “Age of Extremes” — an account of the turmoil that shaped the world between 1914 and 1991 — comes to mind in this era of uncertainty we’ve entered. Yet, despite the obvious connections that can be drawn between the failures of today and other periods of our relatively recent history, policymakers are showing an alarming disregard for the past. Hobsbawm would not have been surprised by this myopia. Writing in “The Age of Extremes,” first published in 1994, he lamented that history was so often expunged from people’s minds.

Can Greece and its lenders speak the same language?

Greece’s coalition government appears to be paring down its expectations for any substantial renegotiation of its bailout terms. Athens is concerned about the absence of the necessary goodwill among its eurozone partners to support an overhaul of the loan agreement. Yet, all Greek economic indicators, including the ones that point to another worse-than-expected contraction this year, scream for a substantial reworking of the package.  The government’s only hope is that after almost three years of talking at cross purposes, Greece and the key European players quickly discover a way to speak a common language.

Ahead of this week’s European Union leaders’ summit and the latest visit from the troika inspectors, due to start on Sunday, the nascent coalition was steeling itself for tough negotiations with its lenders. There was a fundamental flaw to its strategy, though. Greece was preparing for political bartering when its partners were only interested in an economic discussion.

PSI: Gift horse or Trojan horse?

Illustration by Manos Symeonakis

Given that Greece struggled for weeks to find just a few billion euros in savings to convince its eurozone partners to grant a second bailout, you’d have thought the wiping out of some 100 billion euros from the country’s debt pile — the largest restructuring the world has seen — would have been greeted with the world’s largest collective sigh of relief. It wasn’t.

The lack of high-fiving and back-slapping on the streets of Athens does not mean the bond swap should be dismissed. After all, it’s perhaps the first time in this crisis that all parties involved accepted that Greece can’t pay its debts and that they needed to do something practical about it.