Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

Euro Crisis: The Greek Deal Is a Disaster for Greece, and Maybe for Europe:

On Monday, there was yet another deal. But this time it is one that pushes Greece into the abyss, even if financial markets don’t acknowledge it just yet and even if what happens next is deeply uncertain.

…Just a week ago, its voters overwhelmingly rejected a bailout offer that was less punitive than the one its leaders just accepted.

Yet the deal that Greek leaders and their creditors reached Monday morning after a brutal series of overnight talks promise to deepen political and economic strains in a country already in depression.

And this, oh yes this:

France “won” in the sense that the unraveling of the eurozone did not happen on July 13, 2015. But it came at the cost of policies that make it less likely that will be the case one, six, or 12 months from now.

If this counts as a victory for the European project, it is hard to imagine what a defeat would look like.

Why are the financial markets up on this? Gangrene is better than amputation? Why should the stock markets be happy that bond vultures were (temporarily) saved at the expense of the real economy?

The sources of the Europe/Greek disaster are plain, and quickly seen in these two short posts:

Kevin Drum, Europe’s Message to Greece: Don’t Let the Door Hit You On Your Way Out, summarizes just how much Germany et al have demanded of Greece, including this excellent quote from that bastion of anarcho-liberalism, the Wall Street Journal:

Sunday’s statement on Greece by eurozone finance ministers will go down as one of the most brutal diplomatic démarches in the history of the European Union, a bloc built to foster peace and harmony that is now publicly threatening one of its own with ruination unless it surrenders.

….The other 18 euro members were late Sunday pushing Greece to implement all of the austerity measures and broader economic overhauls its voters have twice rejected—in elections in January and in a referendum on July 5—not in return for new rescue loans, but as a precondition for even talking about them.

Not that there isn’t plenty of blame to go round to the Greek side also, as Yves Smith reminds us in “Greece Brought a Latte to a Gunfight”:

Yanis appears to have assumed that he could grasp the European light on the hill and persuade with elegant reason all of Europe to embrace enlightened super-national consciousness. He’s been genteelly sipping lattes at a gunfight and by doing so has played right into realist German hands by destroying his country’s economy as an example to all other European ‘dead beats’.

There is nothing new here. Yanis has simply been outplayed. When it was elected, Syriza either had to sign up to new terms of austerity or immediately leave the euro. It’s stylish five month congress with Europe has ruined its economy to no purpose of its own given it will either now buckle under to even deeper austerity or will still be forced out of the euro, taking its economy from wrecked to destroyed.

As for me, either Europe will provide subsidies under the table and quickly (unlikely!) or I still say that Grexit is coming.