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Parthenon, Athens – Photo: Wiki) – Author: Onkel Tuca! Address – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Parthenon.JPG
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard makes the following points about the Greek election -
The incoming government: “…. cannot meet the terms of each quarterly Troika payment in the future even if it secures the support of PASOK socialists because the terms are – politically – impossible to meet.”
Year after year of "internal devaluation" will drive unemployment to catastrophic levels before it breaks the back of the labour movement sufficiently to clear the way for drastic pay cuts. It is basically a Fascist policy. Mussolini pulled it of in 1928 under the Lira Forte policy, but he had coercive advantages. …”
“ … Their original forecasts massively understated the level of GDP contraction because they falsely assumed that the Greek private sector would take the baton from the shrinking government.
All that happened is that the state stopped paying its bills to private subcontractors, pushing thousands of firms into bankruptcy. …
This is what Professor Vanis Varoufakis from Athens University has to say about the Troika policies (via Naked Capitalism): ”
"Consider what they are telling the Greek people: They are saying that Greece, to remain in the Eurozone, must,
(a) carry on borrowing from the EFSF at 4% (and thus adding to Greece’s public debt) in order to pay the ECB (which will be making a 20% profit from these payments, courtesy of the fact that it had previously bought Greece’s bonds at a 20% to 30% discount)
(b) reduce public spending by 12 billion euros in order to be ‘allowed’ to borrow for the benefit of bolstering the ECB’s profits from these transactions involving bankrupt Greece.” …
Read More of this Article At:
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard: Relief all around Europe … but don’t expect that to last much beyond today, © Telegraph.co.uk, reproduced in Irish Independent, Monday June 18th 2012 -
