Many of you might be thinking, “Christian are you off your rocker… If Greece goes under the Euro zone will go under…” I say, no, it will in fact strengthen the Euro zone because a precedent has been set. Namely that the Eurozone must clean up its act and balance its budgets.
The Greek prime minister is doing best what politicians of Greece have been doing all along, namely avoiding the issue. Here is the problem Greece said that they are cutting wages by 20%. Yet is that an answer? That is a knee jerk reaction that is not serious. I mean after all what do you think is going to happen to the country? Do you really think anything is going to function?
I actually think that this is a ploy because the real measures that could work like increasing the pension age is only being done by two years from 61 to 63. What surprised me with that number is that why is Greece so low?
The Eurozone is taking a hard line against Greece because Greece cheated. I remember when the countries had to prove that they could join the Euro, everybody was surprised that Greece made it. And guess what it, seems financial engineering helped here.
According to Eurointelligence’s translation of Der Spiegel’s story: ‘Greece’s debt managers agreed a huge deal with the savvy bankers of US investment bank Goldman Sachs at the start of 2002. The deal involved so-called cross-currency swaps in which government debt issued in dollars and yen was swapped for euro debt for a certain period — to be exchanged back into the original currencies at a later date.’
…
‘But in the Greek case the US bankers devised a special kind of swap with fictional exchange rates. That enabled Greece to receive a far higher sum than the actual euro market value of 10 billion dollars or yen. In that way Goldman Sachs secretly arranged additional credit of up to $1 billion [£642m] for the Greeks.’
Greece has not been honest and the individual eurozone members are not pleased, but they will not say this publically. It also does not help when Greece tries to go around the world to yet again circumvent the rules and tries to sell debt to other countries namely like China. Remember it is up to Greece to live up to its responsibilities.
I am starting to put the pieces together and I am thinking the EU is about to let Greece drop out of the Euro. I think they will pick up the pieces of default with respect to the Euro, but nothing else. Greece will try to retaliate with words, and will probably try to jump out of the union, but Greece will in the end default and probably be the first country to exit the union.
Though I am guessing with respect to the other countries the ECB will be kinder. And the fact that the Euro will fall will only make it simpler for Euro countries to export. In other words there is NO REASON WHATSOEVER for the Euro countries to show too much support for Greece.
I challenge the reader to name me one logical economical reason on why the Eurozone should show support for Greece. And please DON’T use emotions. Use economic reasoning…