Greece - It looks as if the new agreement will have lower surplus targets. But it's not as if there's been a change in the contractionary measures that will be adopted by Greece - these have already been voted in, they were part of the prior actions. What has happened is the lenders and the Greek government have realised that this year, the Greek economy will contract by between 2pc and 3pc and therefore the target for a surplus of 1pc this year and 2pc next year are ludicrous. To lower the targets because the economy is in recession is one thing, to present this as lightening the recessionary burden is quite another and wrong. Nothing has been lightened because the taxes have been voted in. Also, what exactly happened to the debt? What is the understanding with regards to the debt? I have no idea. We're completely in the dark about that. So we don't have a change of measures and a change of policy. The measures and the policies are the same. It's just that the targets have been adjusted downwards. What this means for the debt, I’m not entirely certain. To me it looks like the lenders have had their way and have won hands down. We knew this from early July. The government has accepted austerity and the lenders' policies - those same policies that have been tried in Greece for the last five years and have failed. For such a small unimportant country (I am not passing qualitative judgement here) to have hogged the headlines, day after day after day, for the best part of a year and virtually every other day for the five years before this, takes a special kind of incompetence. I don't blame the Greeks. They are not the incompetence ones, they are just the subject of the EU/EZ institutional incompetence, which has brought us to the present day farce. There is not a hope in Hades, this latest 'bail out' will resolve the Greek/EZ crisis.
We are about to throw yet another €100 billion into the bottomless pit of Greek cash consumption. It will achieve nothing, beyond delaying the eventual decision for another year, if that. We used to laugh, at the stupidity of the FinMin group who spend an increasing amount of their time trying to make the financial systems they control fit the political demands of the Europhiles. Now we just pity the group. They have lost all credibility. If the FinMins were a hopeless failing animal, we would have put them out of their misery, a long time ago. When is someone going to come out and tell the uncomfortable truth to power that needs to be spoken?
It is over for Greece in the €uro zone.
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