German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble and the International Monetary Fund seem to do their best to take the wind out of the Greek government sails. While Prime Minister Samaras and his economic team allegedly prepare taxation cuts, the country’s lenders urge Greeks to continue the so-called “reforms” and even take new austerity measures. At the same time, the issue of a third bailout package comes back even though the German Finance Minister puts it below ten billion euro.
Speaking to German weekly Focus, Wolfgang Schaeuble also brought back on the agenda the notorious Grexit stressing that if Greece wants to remain in the euro, the reform process is essential.
“In 2022, according to the troika’s forecasts, Greece’s debt will reach a level that can be described as sustainable so it may be that Greece will need to make use of limited aid again,” the magazine quotes Schaeuble as saying in an advance extract of an interview due to be published on Monday.
He said the granting of a third aid package was conditional on Greece continuing to meet the terms set by its “troika” of international lenders – the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission and the European Central Bank.
Such a package would be a “much smaller sum than in the first two programmes – so more like a one-digit billion amount,” he said. (Reuters)
An angry Greek Finance Ministry issued a statement commenting on Schauble’s Grexit visions and arguing among others that:
“The question of the participation of Greece in the Eurozone has been answered definitively and irrevocably, and having passed through the economies and bloody sacrifices of the Greek people.
Greece follows the path of those reforms in benefit of the Greek people, namely increasing the national product, opening new jobs and reduce consumer prices, thus facilitating its access to international capital markets without the need for new loan agreements and austerity measures“.
However it was also the IMF that pointed at the need of additional aid to Greece, when it approved the 3.41-billion-euro bailout tranche last Friday. The IMF warns Greeks that they have to continue the path of the strict austerity.
Greece and its lenders seem to disagree on the fiscal gap as well.
stormy euro waters…
PS Since 2010 Greece has received two bailouts totaling 240 billion euro – so what will the difference be for the economically drained Greeks to owe 10 billion more?
