Re: Galbraith on Greece
JULY 8, 2015
The Financial Attack on Greece: Where Do We Go From Here?
by MICHAEL HUDSON
The major financial problem tearing economies apart over the past century has stemmed more from official inter-governmental debt than with private-sector debt. That is why the global economy today faces a similar breakdown to the Depression years of 1929-31, when it became apparent that the volume of official inter-government debts could not be paid. The Versailles Treaty had imposed impossibly high reparations demands on Germany, and the United States imposed equally destructive requirements on the Allies to use their reparations receipts to pay back World War I arms debts to the U.S. Government.[1]
Legal procedures are well established to cope with corporate and personal bankruptcy. Courts write down personal and business debts either under “debtor in control” procedures or foreclosure, and creditors take a loss on loans that go bad. Personal bankruptcy permits individuals to make a fresh start with a Clean Slate.
It is much harder to write down debts owed to or guaranteed by governments. U.S. student loan debt cannot be written off, but remains a lingering burden to prevent graduates from earning enough take-home pay (after debt service and FICA Social Security tax withholding is taken out of their paychecks) to get married, start families and buy homes of their own. Only the banks get bailed out, now that they have become in effect the economy’s central planners.
Most of all, there is no legal framework for writing down debts owed to the IMF, the European Central Bank (ECB), or to European and American creditor governments. Since the 1960s entire nations have been subjected to austerity and economic shrinkage that makes it less and less possible to extricate themselves from debt. Governments are unforgiving, and the IMF and ECB act on behalf of banks and bondholders – and are ideologically captured by anti-labor, anti-government financial warriors.
The result is not the “free market economy” it pretends to be, nor is it the rule of economically rational law. A genuine market economy would recognize financial reality and write down debts in keeping with their ability to be paid. But inter-government debt overrides markets and refuses to acknowledge the need for a Clean Slate. Today’s guiding theory – backed by monetarist junk economics – is that debts of any size can be paid, simply by reducing labor’s wages and living standards, plus by selling off a nation’s public domain – its land, oil and gas reserves, minerals and water distribution, roads and transport systems, power plants and sewage systems, and public infrastructure of all forms.
Imposed by the monopoly of inter-governmental financial institutions – the IMF, ECB, U.S. Treasury, and so forth – creditor financial leverage has become the 21st century’s new mode of warfare. It is as devastating as military war in its effect on population: rising suicide rates, shorter lifespans, and emigration of the age-cohort that always have been the major casualties of war, young adults. Instead of being drafted into the army to fight foreign foes, they are driven from their homes to find work abroad. What used to be a rural exodus from the land to the cities from the 17th century onward is now a “debtor exodus” from countries whose governments owe unpayably high sums to creditor governments and to the banks and bondholders on whose behalf they impose their policy.
While pushing the world economy into a state of war internationally, high finance also is waging a class war against labor – and ultimately against governments and thus against democracy. The ECB’s policy has been brutal toward Greece this year: “If you do not re-elect a right-wing party or coalition, we will destroy your banking system. If you do not sell off your public domain to buyers we will make life even harder for you.”
No wonder Greece’s former Finance Minister Janis Varoufakis called the Troika’s negotiating position “financial terrorism.” Their idea of “negotiation” is surrender. They are unyielding. Official creditor institutions threaten to isolate, sanction and destroy entire economies, including their industry as well as labor. It transforms the 19th-century class war into a purely destructive meltdown.
That is the great difference between today and 1929-31. Then, the world’s leading governments finally recognized that debts could not be paid and suspended German reparations and Inter-Ally debts. Today’s the unpayability of debts is used as leverage in class war.
The immediate political aim of this financial warfare in Greece is to replace its elected government (supported by a remarkable July 5 referendum vote of 61 to 39) with foreign creditor control by “technocrats,” that is, bank lobbyists, factotums and former Goldman Sachs managers. The long-term aim is to impose a war against labor – in the form of austerity – and against the power of governments to determine their own tax policy, financial policy and public regulatory policy.
Fortunately, there is an alternative.
Here is what is needed. (I outlined my proposals in a presentation before the Brussels Parliament on July 3,[2] following an earlier advocacy at The Delphi Initiative in Greece, convened by Left Syriza the preceding week.[3])
A declaration reaffirming the rights of sovereign nations
Sovereign nations have a right to put their own growth ahead of foreign creditors. No nation should be obliged to impose chronic depression and unemployment or polarize the distribution of wealth and income in order to pay debts.
Every nation has the right to the basic criteria of nationhood: the right to issue its own money, to levy taxes, and to write its laws, including those governing relations between creditors and debtors, especially the terms of bankruptcy and debt forgiveness.
Economic logic dictates what was recognized by the end of the 1920s: When debts reach the level that they disturb basic economic balance and derange society, they should be annulled. Another way of saying this is that the volume of debt – and its carrying charges – must be brought within the reasonable ability to pay.
Rejecting the “hard money” (really a “hard creditor”) position of anti-German, anti-labor economists Bertil Ohlin and Jacques Rueff, Keynes argued that creditors had an obligation to explain to Germany just how they would enable it to pay its reparations.[4] At that time, Keynes meant specifically that France, Britain and other recipients of reparations should specify just what German exports they would agree to buy. But today, creditors define a nation’s ability to pay not in terms of how it can earn the money to pay down the debt, but rather what public domain assets it can sell off in what is essentially a national bankruptcy proceeding. Debtor countries are compelled to let their public infrastructure be sold off to rent-extractors to create a neofeudal tollbooth economy.
Under international law, no nation is legally obliged to do this. And under the moral definition of nationhood, they should not be forced to do so. Their right to resist this form of debt blackmail is what makes them sovereign, after all.
It is true that the principle of the European Union was that individual nations would cede their rights to a larger entity. The union itself was to exercise the rights of nationhood, democratically on the basis of a pan-European constituency.
But this is not what has happened. The EU has no common ability to tax and spend; those powers remain local. The one area where it does govern taxes is dysfunctional: EU ideologues insist on taxing consumers (via the Value Added Tax, VAT) and labor via pension set-asides.
More fatally, the eurozone has no ability – or at least, no willingness – to create money to fund deficit spending. What it calls a “central bank” is only designed to provide money to domestic banks and, even worse, to lobby for the interest of private bankers against the principle of public central bank money creation.
The EU does not even have a meaningful legal system empowered to fight fraud and financial crime, prosecute or clean up insider dealing and corrupt oligarchies. In the case of Greece, where the ECB at least insisted on the need to clean up such behavior, it was only to “free” more revenue for foreign investors from public agencies scheduled to be privatized to pay debts to the ECB and its crony institutions for the money they had paid private bondholders and banks in the face of economies shrinking from a combination of debt deflation and fiscal deflation.
Taken together, these defects mean that the Eurozone and EU were malstructured from the start. Control was placed so firmly in the hands of bankers and anti-labor ideologues that it may not be reformable – in which case a new start must be made.
In any event, here are the institutional reforms that are urgently needed. In view of the financial sector’s control of the main institutions, these reforms require entirely new institutions not governed by the pro-rentier logic that has deformed the eurozone. The most pressing needs are for the following institutions.
An international forum to adjudicate the ability (or inability) to pay debts
What is needed to put this basic principle into practice is creation of a new international forum to adjudicate how much debt can reasonably be paid – and how much should be annulled. In 1929 the Young Plan (which replaced the Dawes Plan to deal more rationally with German reparations) called for creation of such an institution – what became the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in 1931 to stop the economic destruction of Germany by bringing its reparations back within the ability to pay.
The BIS no longer can play such a role, because it has become the main meeting place for the world’s central banks, and as such has adopted the hardline “all debts must be paid” position that it originally was intended to oppose.
Likewise the IMF no longer can play this position. It is hopelessly politicized. Despite its technical staff ruling in 2010-11 that Greece’s foreign debts could not be paid and hence needed to be written off, its heads – first Dominique Strauss-Kahn and then Christine Lagarde – acted in blatant conflict of interest to support the French bankers demands for payment in full, and U.S. demands by President Obama and Wall Street lobbyist Tim Geithner to insist that there be no writedown at all. That was the price for French bank support for Strauss-Kahn’s intended bid for the French presidency, and more recently backing for Lagarde’s rise to power at IMF.
Given the U.S. veto power by Wall Street and the insistence that right-wing anti-labor ideologues (usually French) be appointed head of the IMF, a new organization representing the kind of economic logic outlined by Keynes, Harold Moulton and others in the 1920s is necessary.
Creation of such an institution should be a leading plank of Euro-left politics.
A Law of Fraudulent Conveyance, applicable to governments
The private sector has long had laws that prevent money-lenders from lending a borrower more funds than the debtor can reasonably be expected to pay back in the normal course of business. If a lender advances, say, $10,000 as a mortgage loan against a house worth more (say, $100,000), and then insists that the debtor pay or lose his home, the courts may assume that the loan was made with this aim in mind, and annul the debt.
Likewise, if a company is raided by borrowers who load it down with high-interest junk bonds, and then seize its pension funds and sell off assets to pay their debts, the company under attack can sue under fraudulent conveyance rules. They did so in the 1980s.
This lend-to-foreclose ploy is the very game that the Troika have played with Greece. They lent its government money that the IMF economists explained quite clearly in 2010-11 (and reaffirmed this year just before the Greek referendum) could not be paid. But the ECB then swooped in and said: Sell off your infrastructure, sell your ports, your gas rights in the Aegean, and entire islands, to get the money to pay what the IMF and ECB have paid French, German and other bondholders on your behalf (while saving U.S. investment banks and hedge funds from losing their bets that Greek debts would indeed be paid).
Application of this principle requires an international court to rule on the point at which debt service becomes intrusive, and write down debts accordingly.
No such set of institutions exists today.
Creation of Treasuries as national central banks to monetize deficit spending
Central banks today only lend money to banks, for the purpose of loading economies down with debt. The irrational demand by bankers to prevent a public option from creating credit on its own computer keyboards (the same way that banks create loans and deposits) is designed simply to create a private monopoly to extract economic rent n the form of interest, fees, and finally to foreclose on defaulting creditors – all guaranteed by “taxpayers.”
The European Central Bank is not suited for this duty. First of all, it is based on the ideology that public money creation is inflationary. The reality is that central bank money creation has just financed the greatest inflation of modern history – asset price inflation of the real estate market by junk mortgages, inflation of stock prices by junk bond issues, and central bank Quantitative Easing to create the fastest and largest bond market rally in history. The post-1980 experience with central banks has removed any moral or economic logic in their behavior as lobbyists for commercial banks, defenders of their special privileges, deregulator of financial crime, and extremist right-wing blockers of a public option in banking to bring basic services in line with actual costs. In short, if commercial banking systems in nearly every country have become de-industrialized and perverse, their enablers have been the central banks.
The remedy is to replace these central banks with what preceded them: national Treasuries, whose proper function is to monetize government spending into the economy. The basic principle at work should be that any economy’s monetary and credit needs should be met by public spending and monetization, not by commercial banks creating interest-bearing credit to finance the transfer of assets (e.g., real estate mortgages, corporate buyouts and raids, arbitrage and casino-capitalist gambles).
Summary
Every nation has a right to defend itself against attack – financial attack just as overt military attack. That is an essential element in the principle of self-determination.
Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy and other debtor countries have been under the same mode of attack that was waged by the IMF and its austerity doctrine that bankrupted Latin America from the 1970s onward. International law needs to be updated to recognize that finance has become the modern-day mode of warfare. Its objectives are the same: acquisition of land, raw materials and monopolies.
A byproduct of this warfare has been to make today’s financial network so dysfunctional that nations need a financial Clean Slate. The most successful one in modern times was Germany’s Economic Miracle – the post-World War II Allied Monetary Reform. All domestic German debts were annulled, except employer wage debts to their labor force, and basic working balances. Later, in 1953, its international debts were written down. The logic prompting both these acts needs to be re-applied today.
With specific regard to Greece, Syriza’s leaders have said that they want to save Europe. First of all, from the eurozone’s destructive economic irrationality in not having a real central bank. This defect was deliberately built into the eurozone, to enforce a monopoly of commercial banks and bondholders powerful enough to gain control of governments, overruling democratic politics and referendums.
Current eurozone rules – the Maastricht and Lisbon treaties – aim to block governments from running budget deficits in a way that spend money into the economy to revive employment. The new goal is only to rescue bondholders and banks from making bad loans and even fraudulent loans, bailing them out at public expense. Economies are obliged to turn to commercial banks for loans to obtain the money that any economy needs to grow. This principle needs to be rejected on grounds that it violates a basic sovereign right of governments and economic democracy.
Once an economy is fiscally crippled by (1) not having a central bank to finance government spending, and (2) by limiting government budget deficits to just 3% of GDP, the economy must shrink. A shrinking economy will mean fewer tax revenues, and hence deeper government budget deficits and rising government debt.
The ultimate killer is for the ECB, IMF and EC to demand that governments pay their debts by privatizing public infrastructure, natural resources, land and other assets in the public domain. To compound this demand, the Troika have blocked Greece from selling to the highest bidder, if that turns out to be Gazprom or another Russian company. Financial politics thus has become militarized as part of NATO’s New Cold War politics. Debtor economies are directed to sell to euro-kleptocrats – on terms financed by banks, so that interest charges on the deal absorb all the profits, leaving governments without much income tax.
Notes.
[1] This is the theme of my Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (1972, new ed., 2002).
[2] The video of the day can be found here: http://www.guengl.eu/news/article/pr...utions.-2-july (I’m at about 37 minutes.)
[3] http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/06/...i-declaration/
[4] I summarize this debate between Keynes and his antagonists in Trade, Development and Foreign Debt (new ed. ISLET 2009), chapter 16.
Michael Hudson’s book summarizing his economic theories, “The Bubble and Beyond,” is now available in a new edition with two bonus chapters on Amazon. His latest book is Finance Capitalism and Its Discontents. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, published by AK Press. Hudson’s new book, Killing the Host, will be published this summer by CounterPunch Books. He can be reached via his website, mh@michael-hudson.com
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Re: Galbraith on Greece
You are damned if you demand austerity and damned if you don't:
"James Mackintosh at the Financial Times summarizes: "If the Greeks are allowed to walk away from that debt, Spaniards, Portuguese, Italians and Irish will quite reasonably say they should be let off, too." Thus, Germany and other core nations can't indulge Greece's demands for fear of fueling similar anti-austerity political movements such as Podemos in Spain and the Five Star Movement in Italy."
Then there is clientalism:
"Guy Verhofstadt, a leader of the European Parliament, urged Greece leaders to come forward with “a credible reform package” that included a clear calendar and efforts to stamp out clientalism.
The latter term may be new to many readers. It is a type of government that was largely introduced to Greece following the end of a seven-year military dictatorship in 1974. We would call it a "patronage" system in which politicians distribute benefits to individuals or groups in exchange for electoral support.
"Clientalism" is often used interchangeably with corruption, but that is not always the case. Corruption involves dishonest or fraudulent dealings, whereas clientalism typically involves straightforward grants of government jobs for electoral support. Clientalism has been blamed for a vast ballooning of employment in the public sector in Greece at unproductive jobs.
Basically the European Union is asking the Greek government to take tens of thousands of people off the public payrolls as a step toward reforming its financial structure. The eurozone leaders are afraid that one more bailout package is just going to disappear right down the same drain as previous bailouts -- into the hands of self-serving political appointees.
So you can see why it is too simple to group all of the European Union's demands under the label of "austerity." The EU is asking the Greeks to fundamentally change a manner of political organization that has become embedded in their way of life -- and suits the leadership most of all.
It would be as if overseas holders of U.S. debt suddenly demanded that they would stop buying Treasurys unless powerful American politicians stop earmarking congressional bills in ways that send borrowed government money to their districts in the form of new military or highway construction contracts. The politicians in Washington know that their financial support would dry up if they could not dole out riches to their campaign backers, so they would fight such rules tooth and nail."
Jon Markman
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Re: Galbraith on Greece
No country wants the basket case known as Greece. Russia and China, logically, prefer the Germans be stuck with Greece. Russia and China want Germany to keep Greece in working order so China has a port, and Russis has a gas terminal.
They're both too smart to play the disciplinarian role for the out of control child.
the above article is laughable for too many reasons.
Here's the real story about Greece. Take off your bankster glasses, open your mind. (I used to think like many of you do now)
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Re: Does Greece need to borrow?
The economy and tax revenues are collapsing right now. The surplus has been kissed goodbye for some time now.
Greece is beyond broke and is bordering on third world soon.Leave a comment:
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Does Greece need to borrow?
GNK,
I read that Greece actually has primary surplus this year. But does the nation have the political environment to keep it that way?
With a surplus, they could abrogate debt, leave the euro, and just use Drachmas. No need for foreign investors. That is not so simple
if some of the debt holders are internal. I also think the talk about "economic output down 25%" is a little misleading. If you are borrowing money, it is easy
to pump up an economic output number. The question is, what would the economic output have been if the country was not borrowing? That is really hard to answer.
The USA will have to do this experiment at some point.
Now has Greece actually paid down it's debt, or just ceased from more borrowing?Leave a comment:
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Re: Galbraith on Greece
a bigger picture?
Washington has a higher interest than the interests of the US financial interests who purchased discounted sovereign debt with a view toward profiting from a deal that pays 100 cents on the dollar. Washington also has higher interest than the interests of the European One Percent intent on using Greece’s indebtedness to loot the country of its national assets.
Washington’s higher interest is the protection of the unity of the EU and, thereby, NATO, Washington’s mechanism for bringing conflict to Russia.
If the inflexible Germans were to have Greece booted from the EU, Greece’s turn to Russia and financial rescue would put the same idea in the heads of Italy and Spain and perhaps ultimately France. NATO would unravel as Southern Europe became members of Russia’s Eurasian trade bloc, and American power would unravel with NATO.
This is simply unacceptable to Washington.
If reports are correct, Victoria Nuland has already paid a visit to the Greek prime minister and explained to him that he is neither to leave the EU or cozy up to the Russians or there will be consequences, polite language for overthrow or assassination. Indeed, the Greek prime minister probably knows this without need of a visit.
I conclude that the “Greek debt crisis” is now contained. The IMF has already adopted the Greek government’s position with the release of the IMF report that it was a mistake from the beginning to impose austerity on Greece. Pressured by this report and by Washington, the EU Commission and European Central Bank will now work with the Greek government to come up with a plan acceptable to Greece.
This means that Italy, Spain, and Portugal can also expect more lenient treatment.
The losers are the looters who intended to use austerity measures to force these countries to transfer national assets into private hands. I am not implying that they are completely deterred, only that the extent of the plunder has been reduced.
As I have previously written, the Greek “debt crisis” was an orchestration from the beginning. The European Central Bank is printing 60 billion euros per month, and at any time during the “crisis” the ECB could have guaranteed the solvency of any remaining creditor banks by purchasing their holdings of Greek debt, just as the Federal Reserve purchased the troubled mortgage backed “securities” held by the “banks too big to fail.” This easy solution was not taken.
The orchestration was a benefit to Western financial interests in general by enabling enormous speculations on the euro and gambling with derivative bets on sovereign debt and everything connected to it. Each successive “crisis,” such as Sunday’s No vote, became cover for an attack on oil or other commodities. The rigging and manipulation of markets can be hidden by pointing fingers at the latest “crisis.”
John Perkins in his book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, describes the process by which Western financial interests intentionally over-lend to weaker countries and then use the pressure of the debt to force the transfer of the countries’ wealth, and often sovereignty, to the West. The IMF and its austerity programs have long played a role in the looting.
In exchange for reducing euro debt on Greece’s books, Greece was to turn over to private interests its water companies, ports, and protected islands. Unless the One Percent can purchase the current Greek government as it purchased previous governments (for example, with payoffs to borrow money with which to purchase submarines), the referendum has frustrated the looters.
In my book, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism, I explained that the Greek “debt crisis” had two other purposes. One was to get rid of the practice of restructuring a country’s debt by writing it down to a level the country could afford and to establish in its place the new principle that people of a country are responsible for the mistakes of creditors who over-lend. The write-down is no longer to occur on the balance sheet of the creditors’ but instead becomes a write-down of pensions, social services, and employment. This, too, is a process of looting.
The other purpose, as Jean-Claude Trichet, the previous head of the European Central Bank, made explicitly clear, was to further reduce the sovereignty of member states of the EU by transferring authority over fiscal policy (tax and spend decisions) from national governments to the EU in Brussels.
Washington favors this centralization of political power in Europe, and Washington favors the One Percent over the people. However, above all Washington favors its own power and has acted to prevent a Greek exit, which could begin the unraveling of NATO.
Russia and China have missed an opportunity to begin the unraveling of NATO by assisting Greece’s departure from the EU. Whatever the cost, it would be tiny in comparison to the military buildup that Washington is forcing on both countries. Russia and China might have decided that Washington could no more accept Greece’s alignment with Russia than Russia can accept Ukraine becoming a member of NATO.Leave a comment:
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Re: Galbraith on Greece
"it's the reduction of pensions, less govt.jobs,etc. that has to be brought under extreme control. The debt would take care of itself."My retired banker friend did a succinct job in expressing his alligience to the 1% solution.Originally posted by santafe2 View PostLeave a comment:
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Re: Galbraith on Greece
It looks like Germany is destroying the Euro and the European project. The have behaved as little shop keepers owed a bill and mercilessly demanding payment after the debtor has lost their job, savings home. If this is how Germany behaves as a great power, let it be divided again before it destroys Europe a third time. If this is Germany ascendant. why continue to build a European Nation out of the EU and the Eurozone?Originally posted by santafe2 View Post
We're talking about money here; the fiat kind and one of the easiest things for a state to "make." They risk fracturing Europe over electronic ledger entries and lovely intaglio printed portraits on little pieces of colored paper. If the Greeks and Germans and the banksters could engage in a massive "let's pretend" exercise to enable Greek entry, surely a similar bit of make believe would do the trick to resolve the problem their magical thinking created. Everyone who stood to gain "wanted to believe" and so fantasy became reality. How are things different today?
Germany is destroying the EU to save the Euro. So typically German.Leave a comment:
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Re: Galbraith on Greece
We agree on a lot, but I don't want to let the people (not all, but a lot,too many IMO) off the hook.Originally posted by jk View Post
Who voted in every Greek government and why?
I think you know the "who" but here's a hint on the "why":
1) Hiring voters for unnecessary gov't jobs
2) Telling tax authorities to "look the other way"
3) Giving unions everything they want
4) Allowing hundreds of professions to qualify for early retirement based on the dangerous professions category (ex: hairdressers work with caustic chemicals and TV journalists have to deal with bacteria on microphones - I'm not making that up.)
5) Giving extreme benefits to public sector workers - ex: up to two months vacation, and free higher education, even if it is abroad
6) Giving contractors carte blanche on proects
For example, if you're a worker at the Electric Power company, you vote for the candidate that offers the best benefits. And they actually deliver. The entire population looked the other way, until.... the system came crashing down on everyone. Then everyone got holier than thou on everyone else.
Goldman was a footnote in this story that helped them continue the game. Euro adoption also continued the game. The corruption was already there. The banks were brought in to continue it.
Is it a moral obligation for a bank or a country like Germany to warn another country about the effects of its corruption? Imagine if Germany, during the peak of the bubble, lectured Greece on its irresponsible management. That would have went over well in Greece.
I would like to add - Germany, actually the EU, needs a FCPA type law to be enacted (if not already) and enforced.Leave a comment:
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Re: Galbraith on Greece
It's hardly unique to Greeks/EU. It's the basis of governance across the globe.Originally posted by jpatter666 View Post
"A credibility trap is a condition wherein the financial, political and informational functions of a society have been compromised by corruption and fraud, so that the leadership cannot effectively reform, or even honestly address, the problems of that system without impairing and implicating, at least incidentally, a broad swath of the power structure, including themselves.
The status quo tolerates the corruption and the fraud because they have profited at least indirectly from it, and would like to continue to do so. Even the impulse to reform within the power structure is susceptible to various forms of soft blackmail and coercion by the system that maintains and rewards.
And so a failed policy and its support system become self-sustaining, long after it is seen by objective observers to have failed. In its failure it is counterproductive, and an impediment to recovery in the real economy. Admitting failure is not an option for the thought leaders who receive their power from that system.
The continuity of the structural hierarchy must therefore be maintained at all costs, even to the point of becoming a painfully obvious, organized hypocrisy.
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Re: Galbraith on Greece
Unfortunately Greece and the rest of the EU are in what appears to be a classic Mexican standoff.Originally posted by jk View Post
- A Mexican standoff is a confrontation between two or more parties in which neither party can proceed nor retreat without being exposed to danger. As a result, all participants need to maintain the strategic tension, which remains unresolved until some outside event makes it possible to resolve it.
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Re: Galbraith on Greece
there's plenty of blame to go around. the banks, and goldman in particular, facilitated a deception that was desired by the greek government. the corruption and cronyism were perpetuated by the greek gov't. otoh, after facilitating the deception, i wouldn't be surprised to learn that goldman had a huge short position in greek bonds prior to the haircut of a few years ago. there was and is looting going on, of greeks and their present and former bondholders, this looting perpetrated by both greeks and non-greeks.Leave a comment:
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