The Troika Are Just Keeping Markets From Panicking And Buying Governments Time
Wolf Richter, Testosterone Pit
BusinessInsider.com
Jan. 25, 2012
“The case of Greece is hopeless,” Otmar Issing said today during an interview. He should know. He was a member of the Executive Board of the Bundesbank and of the Governing Council of the ECB. Another substantive voice in an increasingly loud chorus.
But it’s legally impossible to kick Greece out of the Eurozone. So he suggested a procedure: Tell the country that it has to implement reforms as a condition for financial help. When implementation is lacking, the basis for financial help disappears, and “you have to end it,” he said. “Then it’s up to the Greeks to think about what they want to do.”
That has been happening all along. The bailout troika (EU, ECB, and IMF) has offered money in exchange for a broad range of tough reforms. At first, it was easy for Greece to agree to reforms in return for bailout billions, but adequate implementation turned out to be impossible. Demonstrations, strikes, and riots, an unwilling bureaucracy, a political power struggle, morose economic conditions—all have seen to it that the unpopular German dictate, as it’s called, would fail.
The Rest…HERE
