About 15,000 protesters marched through the city center Sunday ahead of prime minister George Papandreou’s first speech after his summer vacation, chanting slogans such as “get the IMF out of Greece” and “make the banks pay for the crisis.” The Greek PM says no new austerity measures is needed if the country stayed its fiscal course. However, the people in the streets are still a bit skeptical; the police arrested a 49-year-old man for attempting to throw a shoe at Papandreou.
In his first speech after the summer holidays, Greece’s Prime Minister George Papandreou pledged to press ahead with government attempts to ease the threat of default, saying no new austerity measures were needed if the country stayed on its fiscal course. But the workers unions are threatening with more strikes and protests.
“I have every confidence that at the end of the year we will have reduced, in accordance with our commitments and decisions, the deficit by 40 percent,” Papandreou said in Thessaloniki, northern Greece, yesterday.
“As long as we are progressing well, there is no need for any new measures.”
Papandreou also said his government averted “certain default” by agreeing to wage and pension cuts and tax increases in return for a 110 billion-euro ($139.5 billion) emergency-loan package from Euro-area nations and the International Monetary Fund on May 2.
The measures have hit employment and spending, with the economy shrinking for a second year and inflation rising to the highest since Greece adopted the euro.
The government plans to cut the budget deficit to 8.1 percent of gross domestic product this year from 13.6 percent last year.
Papandreou said a debt restructuring would have been catastrophic.
He also took the opportunity to announce a cut in taxes on retained earnings for companies to 20 percent in 2011 from 24 percent, and emphasized that the 4% tax cut will provide incentives to create jobs.
According to Bloomberg, about 15,000 protesters marched through the city center yesterday ahead of Papandreou’s speech, chanting slogans such as “get the IMF out of Greece” and “make the banks pay for the crisis.”
Police arrested and then released a 49-year-old man for attempting to throw a shoe at Papandreou.
Starting The Tax Hunt
Officials from the EU, IMF and European Central Bank, called the “troika” in Greece, begin a new round of visits in Athens tomorrow, primarily to discuss Greece’s planning for the 2011 budget, which is due to be submitted to parliament early next month.
The country expects to receive a second installment from the troika, of 9 billion euros, this week.
Papandreou said the country has begun seeking information from international banks to hunt down Greeks with accounts abroad who aren’t paying their taxes. A measurement already embraced by several other countries, amongst them USA and Estonia.
Look To Norway!
Greece’s economy contracted in the second quarter more than originally estimated, shrinking 1.8 percent from the first quarter. From a year earlier, GDP declined 3.7 percent.
The jobless rate in June slid to 11.6 percent from 12 percent in May.
Markets will be gradually convinced of Greece’s progress, Papandreou said, pointing to purchases of Greek debt by Norway’s $450 billion Government Pension Fund Global.
The extra yield that investors demand to hold Greek 10-year bonds compared with German bunds rose as high as 957 basis points on Sept. 8, just 16 points short of the record touched on May 7.
For those who are not too familiar with the investment strategy of the Norwegian Pension Fund, I’d like to add that at least 10% of total its total bond holdings are already invested in the PIGS-countries, (the fund refuse to disclose its holdings in Ireland), 50% of its equity investments are placed in the tumbling Chinese stock market and the so-called “Oil Fund” is the fourth largest shareholder in BP.
The smartest investment they’ve done so far is shorting the banks in Iceland just before they went down.
The Norwegian Pension Fund Global owns 1% of all the listed shares in the world, and 2% of all European.
Related by the Econotwist:
Default Now Or Default Later; Greece Still Withholding Critical Data
Morgan Stanley: Governments WILL Default
Brussels Tells Athens To Shut Up And Take The Pain
Greece About To Enter The Death Spiral
A European Revolution by December?
2000yr-Old Secret Organization Makes Threats Against Greek Navy Supplier
EU: Trading Bailouts For Weapons
Greece: Corruption Behind Crisis
Norway’s Government Pension Fund Takes $25bn Hit
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Why The Monetary Union Is A Failure
Over the last months it’s become quite clear that Europe‘s monetary union (EMU) is – more or less – a failure. So, what happened? And what do we do now? In this article professor Kevin O’Rourke provide a comprehensive explanation of the why’s and how’s, and put forward some suggestions for possible solutions of the greatest crisis in modern European history.
“Whether EMU can survive in the long run if the status quo persists is an open question.”
Kevin O’Rourke
“In order to understand why EMU happened, we often turn to the familiar Mundell-Fleming monetary policy trilemma. Given intra-European capital mobility, the decision by a subset of EC members to move to EMU was a logical, if radical response to the challenges posed by this trilemma. However, the institutional framework of EMU is seriously flawed,” Kevin O’Rourke writes.
Kevin O’Rourke is Professor of Economics at Trinity College Dublin, a co-organiser of the CEPR’s Economic History Initative, a Research Fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a Member of the Royal Irish Academy.
He received his PhD from Harvard in 1989, and has taught at Columbia University, UCD, Harvard, and Sciences Po (Paris).
Here is professor O’Rourke’s recent article, syndicated by www.eurointelligence.
A Tale of Two Trilemmas
For decades economists have argued that fiscal union was a desirable, and perhaps indispensable, complement to EMU.
What we now know is that a common euro zone framework for regulating financial institutions, and dealing with the consequences of their failure, is equally important.
We have a monetary union with neither of these complementary institutions, and it is clear that this architecture is not fit for purpose.
How did we end up here, and what happens now?
To answer these questions it is helpful to turn to what Dani Rodrik has labelled the “fundamental political trilemma of the world economy”. Rodrik argues that “we cannot simultaneously pursue democracy, national determination, and economic globalization.
And if we want to keep the nation-state and self-determination, we have to choose between deepening democracy and deepening globalization” (Rodrik 2011, pp. xviii-xix).
The solutions are either to allow popular opinion to manifest itself through supra-national mechanisms, or to ignore it.
EMU solves the political trilemma by abandoning national monetary policy-making, and delegating it to a technocratic Central Bank.
The fact that this has occurred without fiscal union, or common banking policies, can be well understood within the trilemma framework.
Regarding fiscal policy, the combination of the nation-state and democracy has prevented deeper political union: German voters (among others) do not want a transfer union, while Irish voters (among others) do not want a common tax system.
When it comes to banking regulation, on the other hand, the combination of deep economic integration and national policy-making has made it very difficult to respond to the clear demands from citizens for far stricter banking regulation.
There are several features of EU politics which are relevant in thinking about this issue.
The first is the question of governance: how decisions should be made at a supranational level is a contentious issue, which can again be illustrated by means of the trilemma. For most people, ‘democracy’ involves direct elections to parliaments which legislate.
One could leave European decision-making to the European parliament, but the nation-state remains the basic focus of political identity and authority, and national governments remain centrally involved in the process.
One solution would be to prioritize national parliaments and the nation-state: one could then have intergovernmental cooperation, but this would involve national vetoes, and it is hard to see a particularly proactive EU emerging in such a scenario.
The other solution is what we have: an essentially intergovernmental mode of decision-making that gives rise to accusations of a ‘democratic deficit’. This has created a constituency in Europe that is hostile to further integration.
The second relevant feature of EU politics is the international cleavages that exist regarding EMU. In particular, German citizens were opposed to it at the time, and this has political implications today.
The third feature is the existence of sharp intra-national cleavages in opinion regarding the EU in general, and EMU in particular.
Superimposed upon these long-run political cleavages are the effects of the global crisis of 2008-9, and the present banking crisis.
In principle, the global financial crisis could have led people to view the EU as a port in the storm, and there is an element of this in the Irish referendum approving the Lisbon Treaty in 2009. On balance, however, Eurobarometer surveys indicate that attitudes towards the EU have become more negative during the crisis, while there has been a fairly dramatic deterioration in trust in the institutions of the Union.
Even more serious could be the mishandling of the banking cum debt crisis. The decision of the ECB to veto the new Irish government’s desire to impose burden sharing on private bank bondholders is extraordinary, and provides Irish eurosceptics with an extreme example of the democratic deficit in action.
Meanwhile, taxpayers in Finland and elsewhere are revolting against the notion that they should bail out their profligate partners – recognising that this is a European banking crisis that needs a European solution might help change perceptions.
Whether EMU can survive in the long run if the status quo persists is an open question.
Governments have tended to muddle between the stark trade-offs implied by the political trilemmas, but this crisis may force them to confront those trade-offs head-on.
What happens then is anyone’s guess.
By Kevin O’Rourke
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