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Grekland Fas 2Det finns de som försöker skylla den aktuella krisen på euron.
Peter Wolodarski, DN 2010-05-02 Grekland står på randen av statsbankrutt.
EU:s valutaunion har visat att den inte håller måttet. Att EU:s valutaunion spricker är inte realistiskt, men att det ”otänkbara” faktiskt diskuteras säger åtskilligt om allvaret. Signerat, Claes Arvidsson, SvD 7/5 2010 Is the crisis coming back? Greece Greek lenders are covering their funding gap through loans from the European Central Bank (ECB), which reached a record €96bn in July. The green light from Brussels failed to offer any respite for Greek bonds. Spreads on 10-year Greek debt rose to 835 basis points over German debt. They are trading once again at the crisis levels of early May, before the EU launched its "shock and awe" rescue and the ECB began purchasing Greek bonds. Full textThe Euro Crisis The entire country is in the grip of a depression. Everything seems to be going downhill. The spiral is continuing unabated, and there is no clear way out. The worse part, however, is the fact that hardly anyone still hopes that things will improve one day. Full textIn May, the EU and the IMF agreed to loan Greece 110bn euros over three years. ... Grekland går inte i konkurs den 13 september Hungary's IMF revolt augurs ill for Greece Det största problemet: Alan Beattie bevakar internationell handel för Financial times. Franska, spanska och tyska banker skulle kunna få hjälp från den nyskapade europeiska räddningsfonden. Alla kan inte exportera sig ur krisen, för då är det ingen som köper. The snag with Germany’s idea (insolvency rules)is that it goes too far The Folly of Currency Pegs Moody's cuts Greece to junk Moody's cut its rating on Greek debt four notches to Ba1, a speculative rating that the firm says connotes "questionable" credit quality. ECB Buying Up Greek Bonds Grekland, Spanien och grunderna i macro Greece is implementing a sweeping austerity plan. Slightly more than two weeks ago, eurozone leaders and the International Monetary Fund unveiled a €750bn ($920bn) package that, in effect, guarantees that Greece will be funded for the next couple of years. That pot is also big enough to cover Portugal and Spain, if those countries needed aid. So far, so good. But what is crucially unclear is what happens after that point. So the worry for Greek bondholders today is that they are now becoming subordinate to the IMF and the eurozone, but without any guarantee that this bail-out will work. Hence the concern that this game will eventually result in a restructuring. If so, just how big might any haircuts be? SNS, Pagrotsky och Greklands återhämtning IMF-rapport varnar Ländernas konkurrenskraft har också betydelse för valutans stabilitet.
DN huvudledare 7/5 2010 The European Cental Bank's bailout package is just a $1 trillion fig leaf covering the problem and Deutsche-Bank-Chef Ackermann: Greece won’t repay all of its debt We do not know quite what Deutsche Bank is up to, but the bank has been very forthright, about the Greek situation. In a German talk show, Josef Ackerman said that Greece won’t repay all of its debt, and that rescheduling was very likely .But he also added that there is no alternative to helping Greece because otherwise the eurozone would have melted down. The best course of action to take is to push through austerity now, and if this is not enough, to restructure and to reschedule debt, according to Der Spiegel. Finanskrisens härjningar. Kronans svängningar. Greklands ekonomiska kaos. Greek crisis exposes default lines running through the eurozone IMFs dödsdom över Grekland och EU:s räddningspaket Grekpaketet handlar om bankstöd och imperiebyggande. Ett intressant inlägg kommer från tankesmedjan Bruegel i Bryssel. I rapporten ”Two crises, two responses” skriver ekonomerna André Sapir och Jean Pisani-Ferry om stora och viktiga skillnader mellan de krisdrabbade ekonomierna. Som exempel tar de Grekland och Spanien, två länder med olika typer av problem som varken kan eller bör lösas på samma sätt. Varför reagerade ingen i Bryssel? Mrs Merkel made a moving plea to the Bundestag to support the €110bn (£93bn) rescue for Greece. To Angela Merkel and Germany’s political class, the state elections in North-Rhine Westphalia are infinitely more important than the future of the eurozone. The “c” word: Contagion A bail-out for Greece is just the beginning Given the huge fiscal retrenchment now planned and the absence of exchange rate or monetary policy offsets, Greece is likely to find itself in a prolonged slump. Would structural reform do the trick? Not unless it delivers a huge fall in nominal unit labour costs, since Greece will need a prolonged surge in net exports to offset the fiscal tightening. The alternative would be a huge expansion in the financial deficit of the Greek private sector. That seems inconceivable. The crises now unfolding confirm the wisdom of those who saw the euro as a highly risky venture. These shocks are not that surprising. On the contrary, they could have been expected. The fear that yoking together such diverse countries would increase tension, rather than reduce it, also appears vindicated: look at the surge of anti-European sentiment inside Germany. How do America and Greece compare? Both nations have lately been running large budget deficits, roughly comparable as a percentage of G.D.P Greece is caught in a trap. Having your own currency, it seems, makes a big difference. Paul Krugman, NYT May 13, 2010 US Dollar Satsa på en hästkur av samma kraft som Lettland! Den grekiska budgetkrisen har nått en kulmen. Från att euron infördes som gemensam valuta har både anhängare och skeptiker sett problemet med att penning- och skattepolitiken inte är helgjutet konstruerad. Penningpolitiken överfördes till europeiska centralbanken medan skattepolitiken hör till medlemsstaternas kompetenssfär. I avsaknad av en gemensam skattepolitik antog man inom EU istället den så kallade stabilitets- och tillväxtpakten. Pakten har en ensidig inriktning på offentliga finanser. Andra aspekter som finansiell stabilitet och konkurrenskraft finns bara med indirekt. Redan idag kan vi se kraven – och önskemålen – på att EU-samarbetet fördjupas. Här bör Sverige vara med fullt ut. Annars kommer Sverige att förlora än mer i inflytande. Framöver ställer krisen frågan om en valutaunion är möjlig utan gemensam finanspolitik.Gunnar Jonsson Signerat DN 2010-04-29 Det är målsättningen om ett ständigt fastare förbund - "ever closer union" - som är själva grundbultsfelet med EU. Europe stumbles upon closer union Tio års test av euron visar att domedagsprofetiorna kommit på skam. EMU:s första dödsoffer BBC: In pictures: Greece protests EMU, tre döda och DN manar: Kör hårt And that’s why a devaluation would help Greece — it wouldn’t reduce the need for fiscal adjustment, but it would reduce the costs associated with fiscal adjustment. Vem har rätt? Krugman eller Carl B Hamilton? Den franska storbanken BNP Paribas har en exponering mot grekiska
statsobligationer på 5 miljarder euro (49 miljarder kronor).
European governments are hoping that Greece’s 110 billion-euro bailout will stop a crisis that Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz says threatens the currency’s survival. While Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero dismissed such talk as “complete madness” yesterday, the risk premium on his country’s 10-year bonds rose to 126 basis points today. Spain’s benchmark IBEX Index, the euro region’s worst performer this year after Greece, fell 1 percent, extending yesterday’s 5.4 percent drop. Portugal’s spread increased to 270 basis points. Full textDe övriga euroländernas finansministrar planerar ett möte på söndag för att ta ställning till Acropolis now There comes a moment in many debt crises when events spiral out of control. As panic sets in, bond yields lurch sickeningly upwards and fear spreads to shares and currencies. In September 2008 the failure of once-stellar Lehman Brothers almost brought down the world’s banking system. A decade earlier, Russia’s chaotic default on its sovereign debt rocked the credit markets, felling Long Term Capital Management, a hugely profitable American hedge fund. When the unthinkable suddenly becomes the inevitable, without pausing in the realm of the improbable, then you have contagion. The Greek crisis—or more properly Europe’s sovereign-debt crisis—looks dangerously close to that FotnotAcopcalypse now ECB Drops Minimum Rating Threshold for Greek Collateral: QE Next? When the ECB Governing Council meets on May 6, the bank's head, Jean-Claude Trichet, will have to explain the U-turn on collateral rules and lay out the organization's future strategy. Options include resuming longer-term refinancing operations; cutting rates from 1% and starting quantitative easing by buying government bonds in the secondary market. --- “The unthinkable -- that the ECB would not accept sovereign securities from a member as collateral -- SOME REALLY BAD NEWS FROM GREECE – OPPOSITION DECIDES TO VOTE AGAINST THE DEAL Vem ska i så fall betala den avskrivningen, är det skattebetalarna i euroländerna? – Det ska de som äger grekiska obligationer göra, de som dumdristigt har köpt dem till alltför höga priser och alltför låga räntor. Det gäller då framför allt banker i södra och centrala Europa, säger Åslund. Om ingenting görs åt Grekland illa kvickt går landet i konkurs. I så fall kommer Portugal och Spanien likaså att tvingas ställa in sina betalningar, vilket inte alls är nödvändigt. Då kollapsar en stor del av det europeiska banksystemet. Europa skulle till och med kunna hamna i ny stor depression. Anders Åslund DN Debatt 30/4 2010 Den enda fördelen med den aktuella situationen är att katastrofen är lika monumental som uppenbar. Till att börja med måste Europa sluta att förneka verkligheten och se den i vitögat. Gråt inte för Grekland utan för Lettland, som varit ett dygdemönster. Grekland: Tiden börjar rinna ut The EU-IMF "therapy" of deflation for Greece repeats the catastrophic errors of Chancellor Heinrich Bruning in the early 1930s and must lead to a depression, he said. --- Den 9 maj är det val i Tysklands största delstat Nordrhein-Westfalen med 18 miljoner invånare. --- Framöver ställer krisen frågan om en valutaunion är möjlig utan gemensam finanspolitik. Det är målsättningen om ett ständigt fastare förbund - "ever closer union" - som är själva grundbultsfelet med EU. Rolf Englund Barometerns website 7/6 2005 What about an outright default? How bad could it be? So what are the possible scenarios? Can Greece find an exit strategy or is it just forestalling disaster? Spaniens externa nettoskuld är fem gånger så stor som Greklands.Läs mer här This is going to be the most important week in the 11-year history of Europe’s monetary union. Under existing law Greece cannot be pushed out. In fact Greece cannot leave the eurozone voluntarily, without having to leave the EU as well. In any case, it is smarter for Greece to default inside the eurozone than outside. So what happens if the Bundestag blocks the aid? Greece will simply default, and this will put several German and French banks that hold large chunks of Greek sovereign and private debt at risk. Germany Friday will be remembered as the day the euro needed rescuing. 77 milarder kronor However, Greece had to pay 430 basis points above German rates to borrow one-year money. Deflation is the only way Greece can effectively tackle its debt problems, International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn was quoted on Monday as saying. CNBC 12 Apr 2010 "The only effective remedy that remains is deflation," Strauss-Kahn told Austrian magazine profil in an interview. European governments offered Greece a rescue package worth as much as 45 billion euros ($61 billion) in three-year loans at below-market interest rates. "Tyskland vek sig för trycket - vi ska inte lura oss själva att sådana lån är något annat än subventioner", sa Frank Schaeffler, biträdande finanstalesman för regeringskoalitionspartiet FDP. What if the Greek loans cannot be repaid? Will they just be rolled over? Down the road, other questions will come into play. What if Greece - deep in recession - cannot meet its target to reduce its deficit by 4% this year? What if the economy goes into freefall? What if countries sense they may not get their money back? If it appeared others might want rescuing, when would the German taxpayer cry "enough"? Can the single currency prosper without fiscal union - a step with profound political implications? Can the eurozone survive when its economies are so different? Greece debt to foreign banks, total: 302.6 Billion dollars Germany - 43.2 Varför frågar ingen Birgitta Ohlsson om Grekland och EMU? As I write, it appears that EU experts have agreed on a package of €20bn to €25bn at 350 points above the IMF tariff, or 5pc. Greece must squeeze a further 13pc of GDP from the budget to stabilise debt costs by 2012, and do so during a slump when every euro of tightening leads to €1.5 to €2 in lost demand. "The risk is of a viscious downward cycle," Mr Johnson, the IMF's former chief economist, wrote in the Huffington Post.EU officials react with outrage to comparisons with Argentina, but as Mr Johnson says "Greece is far more indebted, is much less competitive in global markets, and needs a greater fiscal and wage adjustment". Yet let us be honest. This is not a bail-out for Greece. It is a bail-out for European creditors that account for most of Greece's €391bn external debt (163pc of GDP). As such it is the first line of defence against greater sums at risk across Club Med. The EU rescue shifts the debacle onto taxpayers in order to prevent a systemic crisis, just like the bank bail-outs after the Lehman failure. The question is whether German Landesbanken with wafer-thin capital ratios can withstand a second crisis after losing so much already on US subprime debt. This has echoes of Credit Anstalt, the Austrian bank that collapsed in June 1931, exposing the underlying rot of Europe's banks. It set off an earthquake across Germany and Central Europe. Contagion spread back into the Anglosphere, snuffing out the recovery of early 1931. The global financial order came crashing down. The Great Depression began in earnest. Time to Reread the History of Austria's Creditanstalt in 1931... Leaders of the 16 eurozone nations have agreed to fund up to 30 bn euros in emergency loans for Greece Greece has to find around 11.5 bn euros by next month to meet its financial obligations. Det finns ändå anledning till viss optimism. Redan nästa vecka måste Grekland försöka förlänga en del av landets stora statslån. Under de fem kommande veckorna behöver Aten låna motsvarande hundra miljarder kronor för att täcka det stora underskottet i den grekiska statsbudgeten DN är optimister om Grekland, EU och EMU Germany's Bundesbank has fired a warning shot at Chancellor Angela Merkel, attacking the joint EU-IMF rescue plan for Greece as Barclays Capital said any rescue would have to be at least €40bn-€45bn to restore confidence and provide Greece the funding it needs to buy time for reform. Paul Krugman: "Grekland kommer att lämna euron" E24 6/5 2010 "Jag hoppas att man, någonstans djupt nere i källarvalven hos ECB och det grekiska finansdepartementet, börja tänka det otänkbara. För detta fruktansvärda utfall börjar se bättre ut än alternativen", skriver Paul Krugman. --- Many commentators now believe that Greece will end up restructuring its debt — a euphemism for partial repudiation.I agree. But the reasoning seems to stop there, which is wrong. In effect, the consensus that Greece will end up defaulting is probably too optimistic. I’m growing increasingly convinced that Greece will end up leaving the euro, too. Paul Krugman 6/5 2010 Any announcement of plans to leave the euro would, as Eichengreen points out, trigger disastrous bank runs. I hope that somewhere, deep in the bowels of the ECB and the Greek Ministry of Finance, people are thinking about the unthinkable. Because this awful outcome is starting to look better than the alternatives. The key thing to understand about Greece’s predicament is that Until recently, being a member of the euro zone seemed like a good thing for Greece, bringing with it cheap loans and large inflows of capital. But those capital inflows also led to inflation — and when the music stopped, Greece found itself with costs and prices way out of line with Europe’s big economies. Over time, Greek prices will have to come back down. And that means that unlike postwar America, which inflated away part of its debt, Greece will see its debt burden worsened by deflation. Greece could alleviate some of its problems by leaving the euro, and devaluing. But it’s hard to see how Greece could do that without triggering a catastrophic run on its banking system. Indeed, worried depositors have already begun pulling cash out of Greek banks. I’ve always been a mild euroskeptic — As I’ve tried to point out in a number of posts, Spain’s troubles are not, despite what you may have read, the result of fiscal irresponsibility.
IMF:s förre chefsekonom, MIT-professorn Simon Johnson, och hans professorskollega Peter Boone visar i en lång artikel på ekonomibloggen Baselinescenario.com att Greklands ekonomiska situation är långt värre än vad den var i Argentina under åren 1991-2001, det vill säga fram till det att Argentina ställde in sina betalningar. Per Lindvall SvD/e24 2010-04-08 Marknadens oro för en betalningsinställelse är uppenbart rimlig oavsett om ECB:s Trichet vägrar se det på sin karta utan fortsätter tillåta att grekiska statsobligationer används som panter i banken. The Baseline Scenario8/4 2010 Greek Bonds Drop a Seventh Day, Spread Widens The yield on the 10-year Greek bond rose 30 basis points to 7.54 percent, as of 10:57 a.m. in London. The cost of insuring against a default on Greek government bonds rose above that for Iceland for the first time. Bloomberg April 8 2010 Why the Greek rescue isn’t going to plan Markets around the world have yet to recognise the complexity of this situation. When they do, it will also become apparent that Greece is part of a wider, and historically unfamiliar phenomenon – that of a simultaneous and large disruption to the balance sheet of many industrial countries. Tighten your seat belts. Mohamed El-Erian is chief executive and co-chief investment officer of Pimco Capital flight squeezes Greek banks George Papaconstantinou, finance minister, said on Wednesday that the banks “have asked for access to the remaining funds of the support plan” – a $37bn government package that was put together during the 2008 global credit crunch. Many savers had chosen to move funds to their banks’ subsidiaries outside Greece, including Cyprus and Luxembourg, rather than switch to foreign institutions. Others had transferred funds to local subsidiaries of foreign banks, the banker added. Mr. Van Rompuy and many investors fear a sovereign default would start a chain reaction of panic and failures, perhaps breaking up the euro zone. Other fragile European banks would suffer. Other weak sovereign borrowers might follow, intentionally or not, creating a cascade of traumatic defaults. For months, politicians like Mr. Van Rompuy have been trying to convince a doubtful world that a Greek default is unthinkable. A change would cause a shock, but on reflection investors might actually welcome a more realistic approach. The Greek problem is important for the world, because the country has a particularly acute case of a common financial disease: debts that are too large to be serviced by its current incomes The leverage-fed global bubble in asset prices has left many individuals, some companies and a daunting list of countries at credible risk of default whenever interest rates rise from their current ultralow levels. The United States and the Britain are certainly on the list. Grekiska statspapper "massakreras" i en marknad med starkt säljtryck och dålig likviditet.  I am willing to risk two predictions. The Greek government has demonstrated that it can still borrow at a rate of about 6 per cent but if you do the maths on the public debt dynamics, as I did recently, it would be hard to arrive at any other scenario than an eventual default. The adjustment effort needed to prevent a debt explosion is extremely large. The Nordic countries achieved adjustment on a similar scale during the 1980s and 1990s, but they had two advantages over Greece. They did it in a different global environment; but more crucially they were, in part, able to devalue and improve their competitiveness. As a member of a large monetary union Greece can improve its competitiveness only through relative disinflation against the eurozone average, which in effect means through deflation. But as the French economist Jacques Delpla* has pointed out, this will invariably produce a debt-deflation dynamic in the Greek private sector of the kind described by the economist Irving Fisher during the 1930s. Last Monday, when Athens tried to sell 5bn euros' of bonds, it was forced to offer an interest rate barely changed from the previous week. It's still costing Greece twice as much to borrow as it does Germany. For a country that is meant to have the financial backing of the most powerful economies in Europe and the IMF, this is hardly encouraging. So now the nub of the problem is that every cent of savings that is squeezed out of the hapless Greek public sector will have to be spent paying this level of interest. BBC World News business presenter Jamie Robertson, 5 April 2010 Nu är problemet att Papandreou, eller vad han heter, den socialist som är statsminister i Grekland efter att ha fått sin utbildning i Sverige, har sagt att han vill att Grekland skall kunna låna till samma ränta som Tyskland gör. Southern Europe's problem is essentially a competitiveness problem, and not a fiscal one, The fix was in. The deal done. As I sat at breakfast that morning a thought nagged away at me. I could not think of a serious economist who did not believe the euro was a flawed currency. It was the morning after the night before and I was riding an elevator to the 13th floor in the European Commission. Two men smiled at each other and one said "I hear Greece has been saved". "Couldn't be better," beamed the other, before disappearing into the vastness of bureaucracy. It felt like news shared from a distant front: "Bastogne has been relieved" or "Malta is holding out". Gavin Hewitt, the BBC's Europe editor blog 26 March 2010
The French president also got written into the draft a phrase that mentioned "the economic government of the European Union". It was the Irish, initially, that choked on the words. The Dutch and the British were not far behind. Officials emerged to say there had been "asymmetrical translation" and the word "government" was replaced by "governance". In truth the Germans and French mean different things by the words "economic governance". The Germans want a tougher regulatory regime that won't tolerate cheats. The French want to see closer economic co-operation. The IMF should impose default on Greece to end the charade Suitably, she was wearing a medallion of a Spanish silver coin dating from 1580, celebrating Philip II’s third default in eighteen years. These magnificent defaults did not stop Spain launching the Armada against Elizabethan England a little later, or attempting to roll back the Protestant Reformation in a last maniacal attempt to impose Habsburg-Papal absolutism on free thinkers, but it did cripple some great European banking dynasties — about 20 in all. A country can in theory deflate its way back to competitiveness by an `internal devaluation’, ie relative wage cuts, in this case by 20pc to 25pc. Benito Mussolini cut wages by 20pc or so in 1928 when Italy returned to Gold with his Lira Forte policy, but he had Fascist controls on the unions, and Camicie Nere to assist. Italy was not in any case facing the aftermath of a property boom. It may not be possible for a country to execute such a policy when it already has a public debt above 100pc of GDP, or in Greece’s case nearing 130pc by next year. Debt dynamics take over. The policy leads to a self-feeding spiral in compound interest. This will become evident very soon if — as some economists predict — Greece’s economy contracts by 4pc to 5pc this year. This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly Read: “Lending to the Borrower From Hell: Debt Default In the Age of Phillip II, 1556-1598? by Maucio Drelichman and Hans-Joachim Voth for details on why the banks kept lending after each default. I am aware of the commitment of Europe’s elite to the success of the European project. Prime Minister George Papandreou’s government must raise about 53 billion euros this year, Failure to do so could spark a new round of the fiscal crisis and trigger the use of the aid plan to help Greece finance its budget deficit by standing behind the nation’s debt crafted by EU leaders in Brussels March 25. The euro’s big fat failed wedding The creators of the euro were like parents fixing an arranged marriage. They knew that they were locking together countries with very different economies and political cultures. But they hoped that, over time, the new partners would grow together and form a genuine union. Once Europeans were using the same notes and coins, they would feel how much they had in common, develop shared loyalties and deepen their political union. Finally, the designers of the single currency were hoping for a third form of convergence, between elite and popular opinion. They knew that in certain crucial countries, in particular Germany, the public did not share the political elite’s enthusiasm for the creation of the euro. But they hoped that, in time, ordinary people would embrace the new single European currency. It is also now obvious that countries such as Greece, Spain and Portugal are struggling to compete with the much more productive German economy. In a currency union they cannot devalue their way out of trouble. The only alternative solution on offer is a long and painful period of austerity to reduce their costs through cuts in wages and living standards. When the euro was launched, leading German politicians used to argue, with evident relish, that monetary union would eventually require political union. The Greek crisis was precisely the sort of event that was expected to force the pace. But, faced with a defining crisis, Ms Merkel’s government is avoiding airy talk of political union – preferring instead to force harsh economic medicine down the throats of the reluctant Greeks. Greece Borrows After EU Deal The aspect that puzzled me most was the announcement that a rescue would come in the form of a loan at market interest rates. Greece would have to be cut off from the capital markets; in such a situation it is difficult to imagine that a loan from the EU – at prohibitively high interest rates – would solve any problems. The Greek problem is not simply access to capital – which has not been a problem during its crisis so far – but the interest rates the country has to pay for its debt The Greek government recently announced an austerity package that aims to shave 4 percentage points off the deficit-to-gross domestic product ratio. This will result in a deep and probably long recession. When a country adopts an austerity package of such magnitude it needs some form of relief, simply to make it through the recession. This would normally come either through devaluation or from a low-interest loan, usually from the International Monetary Fund, or ideally both. Greece will have neither. Nu är problemet att Papandreou, eller vad han heter, den socialist som är statsminister i Grekland efter att ha fått sin utbildning i Sverige, har sagt att han vill att Grekland skall kunna låna till samma ränta som Tyskland gör. For Greece to ‘leave the Euro’ involves the launch of a new curreny. From scratch. People talk as if the drachma lives on The Eurozone is not a fixed-exchange rate system, it’s a common currency area. The drachma has been abolished. This parrot is deceased. The Irish Economy March 27th, 2010 David McWilliams has advocated in his SBP column that Ireland should choose to ’leave the Euro’. Please explain, in great detail (this is not a transition-year project) precisely |
