17.4.2010. Ποιος θα πληρώσει τα σπασμένα και ποιος θα λογοδοτήσει!

Σημ. Συνέχεια και του χθεσινού μου κειμένου παραθέτω χωρίς πολλά σχόλια κείμενο της Wall Street Journal. Οι αριθμοί μιλούν μόνοι τους και η συνάφεια πασίδηλη. Θέτω μόνο ερωτήματα με πολύ νόημα και γνωστές απαντήσεις:
Ποιος φρόντισε ούτως ώστε η Ελλάδα μετά την ένταξη στην ΕΕ να προσαρμοστεί θεσμικά και οικονομικά;
Ποιος διασφάλισε ούτως ώστε τα διάφορα πακέτα σύγκλισης θα πήγαιναν σε παραγωγικούς σκοπούς;
Ποιος λεηλάτησε τους δημόσιους πόρους σε προϊόντα πολυτελείας αντί σε στέρεα και παραγωγική ανάπτυξη;
Ποιος μιλούσε για παγκοσμιοποιήσεις και άλλες ηχηρές σαπουνόφουσκες που καθιστούν απηρχαιωμένη, δήθεν, την εθνική κυριαρχία και την έννοια εθνικό συμφέρον «παρωχημένη ελληνική ιδιοτροπία»;
Ποιοι φαντασιόπληκτοι πρόβλεψαν την ύπαρξη ενός μακάριου υπερεθνικού ευρωπαϊκού χώρου όπου η Ελλάδα θα εφησύχαζε;
Ποιος κατάλαβε λάθος ότι η ΟΝΕ είναι δήθεν οικονομική ένωση προικισμένη με αλληλεγγύη και κοσμοϊστορικά οράματα;
Ποιος ήταν τόσο επιστημονικά αμαθής για να μην γνωρίζει τις στοιχειώδεις πολιτικοστρατηγικές της ΟΝΕ που εγώ απαιτώ να γνωρίζουν οι δευτεροετείς φοιτητές μου και που έπεισε την πολιτική ηγεσία ότι είναι «σκληρός πυρήνας» πολιτικά ενοποιημένων κοινωνιών;
Ποιός ή ποιοι τσαρλατάνοι έπεισαν το πολιτικό σύστημα ότι η κοινοτική γραφειοκρατία είναι κοσμοποπλαστικό μέσο δημιουργίας μιας υπερεθνικής ανθρωπολογίας διεθνιστικού χαρακτήρα;
Ποιος λεηλάτησε τον δημόσιο πλούτο για την δημιουργία ενός ληστρικού-πελατειακού κράτους που καταχρεωμένο τώρα εγκλώβισε την ελληνική κοινωνία στην μιζέρια και στην ανασφάλεια;
Ποιος επέφερε δήθεν «εκσυγχρονισμό» που σε ελληνική αριστερονεοφιλελεύθεροσυνασπισμένη μετάφραση σημαίνει πνευματικό αφοπλισμό των ελλήνων, των συμβόλων τους, της ιστορίας τους, της αυτό-εκτίμησής τους και της εθνικής τους ανεξαρτησίας;
Ποιοι, αυτή την καταχρεωμένη, λεηλατημένη και πελατειακά παραφορτωμένη Ελλάδα την σταύρωσαν άρον άρον ρίχνοντάς την στον «ισχυρό πυρήνα», δηλαδή σε ένα οικονομικό λάκκο των λεόντων;
Ποιες είναι οι δύο τελευταίοι μεγάλοι πολιτικά υπεύθυνοι για το ναυάγιο την Ελλάδα αλλά τώρα ποιούν νήσσα; (και ο ένας εξ αυτών κάνει ταξίδια αναψυχής βλέποντας βίντεο με το στέλεχος του διεθνικού ιδρύματος που ενσαρκώνει την ξένη εξάρτηση!).
Ποιοι επιστημονικά μεταμφιεσμένοι με το αζημίωτο εκτόξευαν εργολαβικά επιστημονικές σαπουνόφουσκες αλλά συνεχίζουν να παρελαύνουν στις πολιτικοστοχαστικές και επικοινωνιακές πασαρέλες της εθνικής παρακμής;
Και τα λοιπά.
ΝΒ αυτονόητα τα πιο πάνω ερωτήματα και οι αυτονόητες απαντήσεις δεν καταγγέλλουν αλλά διαπιστώνουν.

By CARL B. WEINBERG A Bailout Will Still Leave Greece Struggling With Debt
The Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304510004575186300233555016.html?KEYWORDS=CARL+B+WEINBERG
The financial crisis in Greece is best understood by looking at the hard numbers : Over the next five years, Athens has to raise €240 billion, roughly the country’s current gross domestic product. Of that amount, €150 billion is to pay down the principal owed on maturing bonds. The rest is interest. This illustrates why the euro-zone offer of a €30 billion standby credit facility is just a drop in the bucket compared to Greece’s overall cash requirements. Athens is unlikely to be able to raise this much money from private investors at any interest rate.
When Europe’s «bridge» financing is exhausted—probably by the early months of next year—Greece’s government will be in the same plight it is in right now: With a triple-B-minus rating, an unacceptably high and rising debt ratio, and a contracting economy, the country will be just as unable to finance itself next winter as it was last week.

A Greece bailout nears. But a growing body of opinion maintains that it will not be enough to see Greece through its debt crisis. That would mean a debt restructuring or default will sooner or later follow.
Even optimists recognize that large as it is —€30 billion ($41 billion) with perhaps another €15 billion from the International Monetary Fund—the bailout is only buying time for Greece. The reason there are so many pessimists is because of the scale of the task that Greece faces in the time that the bailout has bought.
According to Greece’s 2010 economic plan, Greece needs to wipe four percentage points from last year’s budget deficit that neared 13% of gross domestic product. That kind of budget pruning has been tough to achieve wherever in the world it has been tried.
But as Peter Boone of the London School of Economics and Simon Johnson, a former IMF chief economist, point out in their Baseline Scenario blog even a cutback of this magnitude leaves Greece seeking to raise more than €50 billion this year, money that will finance interest payments and expand its borrowing by a further 4%. So its debt is still growing: the economists’ think Greece’s debt could, even under relatively benign assumptions, expand from 114% of GDP today to 150% of GDP by 2012.
Servicing that would absorb 9% of Greek incomes in 2012, most of which would be transferred to German, Swiss and French bondholders abroad. This will happen as the Greek economy is shrinking dramatically as real incomes fall. Many Latin American economies struggled during the debt crisis of the 1980s to transfer a fraction of those resources overseas. The worst year for the region, 1984, saw net resource transfers of 4.6% of GDP.
Carl Weinberg, chief economist at High Frequency Economics in New York, is one of those arguing that the bailout won’t be enough. Athens needs to raise €240billion in the next five years, €150billion to pay back maturing bonds. This shows, he said this week in an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal, that the bailout represents «just a drop in the bucket.»
His proposed solution harks back to Latin America in the 1980s. What’s needed, he argues, is a multi-year restructuring arrangement like those that Mexico and others put together to ease their debt burdens. That would consolidate loans maturing over several years into a single loan with a maturity of, say, 25 years. With the terms he proposes, it would cut Greece’s debt by 60%, or €140 billion, over the next five and a half years.
What Mr. Weinberg doesn’t mention is that these multi-year restructuring arrangements, negotiated between government borrowers and banks with the IMF holding the ring, were not enough to overcome Latin American governments’ debt problems. In fact, they were devices that helped battered international bank lenders to preserve the fiction that they would still be repaid in full while they bought time to rebuild their battered balance sheets. Once the banks had recapitalized, by the late 1980s, the Brady Plan found a way for the Latin American governments to undertake an orderly default and impose explicit losses-haircuts-on the bank lenders.
By some measures, Greece has a heavier debt load than Latin America. Developing country borrowers-Argentina, Ecuador, Mexico, Turkey-have defaulted with debt burdens as a proportion of GDP of a fraction of that now being carried by Greece. (Unlike most of the European Union, many would have met the EU’s debt and deficit limits even as they defaulted.)
This heavy burden is one reason why pessimists think a Greek default is likely. Messrs. Boone and Johnson have three scenarios. The first, the non-default option would require a brutal economic contraction, difficult for any government to preside over, and even then it requires at least another two €30 billion bailout packages to guarantee its financing needs for the next three years.
A second option would be to default and stay in the euro, requiring an estimated debt write-down of perhaps 65% of face value and a lot of austerity. Or Greece could default and give up the euro, which they say will result in a sharp devaluation but potentially, as when Argentina abandoned its link with the dollar in 2001, a quick move to a budget surplus (because its debt servicing burden falls), current account surplus (because its goods and services become very cheap to foreigners) and a fairly quick pick-up in growth.
Many people are not ready to accept that the choices are as stark as this. Bond investors may decide the risks are not what they thought they were and give Greece more breathing space than it currently appears to have. Uri Dadush, a former senior World Bank official now at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington, says: «I suspect they do need a rescheduling.» But he adds it is not just a matter of arithmetic. «There’s a lot of psychology in this,» he says.