Greek government sent a 47-page long draft plan to the creditors on Monday. In the lost list of austerity reforms the government has among others: privatizations and early retirement, debt restructuring and Primary Surplus 2015-2018, tax revenues, minimum wage and collective bargain. The signals from the country’s creditors were rather negative: not sufficient enough, they say.
German daily Der Tagespiel obtained the Greek government’s Economic Policy Reforms 7/2015- 31/3/2016 and Completion of the Current Program /Staff level Agreement, May 2015 and has it on a pdf document.
Key proposals
Key proposals of the draft are among others:
Primary Surplus
0.6% of GDP for 2015
1.5% for 2016
2.5% for 2017
3.5% for 2018-2022
Debt Restructuring
Greek government aims at a restructuring of the debt burden for the years to come. According to the reform list, “an optimally legal ans economic solution” should be negotiated together with the European Commission, the European Central Bank (ECB) and the euro bailout fund ESM until 30th June when it comes to the repayment of Greek government bonds, currently still in possession of the European Central Bank. The repayment of debts to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is to take place in two phases: In the first phase, the IMF debt should be repaid as planned until 30 June. Subsequently, the repayment of the refinancing of the debt of the country is to be adapted, according to the paper.
Taxes
Different rates on the already in power “Solidarity Tax” will bring €220 million in 2015 and €250 million in 2016.
[KTG’s note: it will charge more on the rich with 6% for annual incomes €100,001-500,000 and 8% for >€500,001. Currently solidarity tax is 4% for all incomes above €50,001.]
Extra Tax on profits of large companies will bring €1 billion.
A Luxury-Tax hike to 13% (from 10% currently) expected to bring €30 million in revenues.
Tax on television advertisements
Value Added Tax
6% for medicine, books, theater
11% for basic and fresh food stuff, energy, water, hotels, restaurants, newspaper, magazines.
23% for other good and services, including some processed food items (jams, bread, meat etc)
Other revenues from Television licenses
Early Retirement
Not before 62 years old
Minimum Wage
Gradually increase to level “before 2010” by 2016.
[KTG’s note: Minimum Wage is currently at €580 gross. Before Austerity cuts it was €780]Privatizations
€11 billion revenues from privatizations by 2020
Home evictions
No home evictions by banks if home is one and only residence, worth no more than 200,000 euro and annual income of debtor up to 35,000 euro and bank deposits up to 15,000.
There are also measures for tax evasion etc.
Summary in German Der Tagespiegel
Greek Govt Draft Document in English pdf here.
PS At first sight, the proposals are not bad. For a change somebody plans to tax the rich of this country and not just the usual suspects of zero, low or medium incomes.
23% on bread and 11% on magazines?????
proccessed!
Read it in the detail.
This is pure comedy. – Especially Chapter C.
.) The ESM has to buy Greek junk bonds from the ECB at nominal value – profits stay with Greece, risk stays with the ESM
.) 50% of the IMF loans will be paid “gradually or installments following Greece’s choice of the matter” – whenever they please?
.) The ECB is even supposed to soak up more Greek junk bonds (“Quantitative Easing”) -although it already now has more than plenty compared to other nations
.) The European Investment Bank and the European Commission have to fund a growth program for Greece
In other words: Greece intends to continue to live from the creditor nations taxpayer money and tries to buy out the inconvenient IMF with the ESM.
Whoever draftet this: they must be thinking that the counterparts are retarded.
Yeah, Yeah – but when the ECB buys Greek bonds cheap from some hedgefunds-bastards to resell it to Greece for the nominal is totally nice and easy; that in Junkers’ growth program not 300 but max 3 billion come from the EU will only get seen by the whole public this way because others wanna participate too and then the question will be about the lie with the 300 billion, followed by who holds the swaps.
Tsipras and Syriza already cave in a lot with this proposal. But what the “Chris” of the world want has nothing to do with finance or good economics. THey want to punish Greece, the Greeks and prove to all the peoples of Europe there is no alternative to austerity, there is no alternative to the corrupt rule of the oligarchy.
It is about time to say no to the “Shyloks” that want their “pound of flesh”. It is about time to kick out the money lenders from the temple.
Greece is not alone, In Spain POdemos is gona rule in Madrid, Barcelona and other places across the country. There will also be elections in Portugal in October and in Ireland early 2016 (Sin fein might win).
What did they cave in?
The benchmark is the Memorandum of Understanding for Bailout package 2, not the ridiculous election promises.
It is not about austerity – it is about a budgetary surplus. If the Greek government can achieve it without racking up more debt – fine. No austerity needed.
It is not about punishment – the taxpayers of the creditor nations simply have enough of this farce and do not want to pour good money over bad one into a black hole.
Plain and simple and we do not even need evil conspiracies of dark foreign forces haunting the poor Greeks.
Chris-
Are you reading challenged. Since Day 1, the troika has stated what is to be cut (civil service staffing, minimum wage, pensions, etc) and what taxes are to be increased. As is the current issue with pensions of the lowest earners, they are demanding cuts. If that’s not austerity, could you tell me what it is. The Syriza government has offered a budget that they forecast to produce a small primary surplus, yet cutting pensions and abridging labor rights remain a lender demand.
I might believe the lenders’ challenging Syriza’s forecast budget if they hadn’t been so profoundly wrong in the Troika forecast on unemployment and GDP contraction that their plan would cause. The fact is that the lenders cannot, politically, admit that their beloved austerity has failed in Greece. If they did admit to this, it would topple the Spanish, Portuguese and possibly Frau Merkel’s governments. Wolfie, Rojoy, Diesel-Bloomers and company would rather force a default, crank up the anti-Greece propaganda machine and let Europe and the world deal with the consequences, as that is of lesser political risk than admitting an error.
so it is
I can easily tell you, what austerity is: reducing government spending to a level that tne government can afford.
What is this ridiculous ‘Austerity does not work in Greece’? –
Who is supposed to take the bill when the Greek government continues to spend more than it gets in tax revenue?
Do you, your Government and the whole nation think that the EU is a welfare organization with the sole aim to sponsor Greece?
And you hope on Podemos and Portugal? Quite unfortunate that the cake is getting smaller when it is divided into more pieces, isn’t it?
Incredible, how far off reality the Syriza supporters are.
if your fellow Germans start attacking you you should slowly reconsider
Pffff…..Chris, is it possible that you start speaking for yourself and not in the name of other taxpayers (like you do all the time)???
I am a taxpayer and yes, I have also enough of this farce….But I (and many people I know), in contrary to you, have enough of the farce and dirty games played by the institutions!
I totally disagree with your views, so please stop talking like if all the taxpayers share your opinion. Talk for yourself!!!!
A Europe-wide referendum on that case would resolve matters right?
Then we will see, for how long the fun funding would continue…
That’s what the masters want, a referendum with 20% participation
Wake up and small the coffee, Chris
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This is a small price to pay, as the original primary objectives of the bailout are almost completely met. The French and German banks that would have had to be bailed out by French and German taxpayers if Greece defaulted in 2010 are now safely removed from that threat. And the risk of default has been shifted to all the taxpayers of the EU, not just Germany and France, as well as to taxpayers worldwide via IMF involvement. Pretty crafty that Wolfie, isn’t he?
for a moment I had thought that @Chris IS THE WOLFIE!
Chris, You are perfectly correct. I do not understand the “logical reasons” of your opponents.
1)Greek debt. Greek government wants to be in Eurozone (to pay Greek people salaries and pensions in euro), but not to take measures in order to pay the bills. Somebody have to pay Greek debt, do we have any volunteers?
2)European institutions. I agree that the European institutions do not work very well and should be improved. However, what it are the other solutions relative to European democracy: anarchy, (Greek) communism …
Guys, come up with solutions, not critics…everyone can criticize…
Dan- You seem to have missed the point of what Syriza is trying to do, which is slow down the overly aggressive austerity, not avoid paying Greece’s bills or run a perpetual deficit. The Greek economy has contracted some 25%, four times more than the Troika forecast. Unemployment reached 28%, more than double that forecast by the Troika. The lenders’ notion of significantly raising VAT on basic necessities (groceries, medicine, electricity and water, for example) is about as regressive a notion as possible, and will do more economic damage.
–
Greece’s economy involves significantly more self employed as a percentage of the workforce (42%) than most of the Western world. The austerity program took a disproportionate toll on the self employed, as well as small and medium businesses. It will take billions in capital to restore the jobs and businesses destroyed by the program of the last five years. A firm that has merely laid off employees needs little capital to rehire, just an improvement in sales. A firm that has gone out of business needs the capital to return to business to begin hiring. Try to estimate the capital needs of restoring just 50% of the 220,000 small and medium businesses that have gone under and liquidated their assets since 2010. It took my neighbor some 30,000 Euro to simply start a modest two person travel agency in 2009. Individual savings have been depleted under austerity, so where would the capital come from? Not from a job at the lender mandated 580 Euro/month minimum wage.
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I am a labor market theorist by training, and I can tell you that in all the modeling we did back in my graduate school days, the numbers we used for “severe labor market disruption” did not rise to the level austerity has brought to Greece, except when modeling a worldwide depression, and even at that, we did not model the level of self employment or small business ownership devastation experienced in Greece, as it is an unusually high percent of the labor force as compared to the rest of the Western World.
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Syriza is trying to offer a solution. Stabilize the economy. Shift tax burdens from the lower earners to the higher earners. It is the lower earners that are disproportionately going out of business. Retain a modest amount of revenues to reinvest in Greece’s economy, not ship it all outside the country as part of debt service, which does not contribute to GDP and economic growth.
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Most respected economists have weighed in and said that the Troika mandate program was wrong headed. I tend to put more weight behind the advice of Nobel recognized economists than amateurs such as Diesel-Bloomers and Schauble (a lawyer and accountant, by training). Not one Nobel level economist has weighed in on the side of the Troika. Doesn’t that tell you something?
“labor market theorist” is a euphemism for “union cadre”, right? Former PASOK, now SYRIZA?
The very ones that made Greece uncompetitive.
By now, Greece should have had enough of your theories…
And labor market terrorists are these folks behind magnates like TUI that wants to buy for cheap all these family owned hostels and be the messiah to make the former owners to mini-job mini wage slaves.
Oh. Lord, these thankful greedy Greeks still don’t sell, malakies, as all I want is a nice house at the sea with as a bonus the former owner to clean my arse with national-coloured toilet paper kuz I’m such a good lackey of the godfathers of market.
Al F – Thank you for your response. I recognize that I am an engineer and I have no idea about economic models. However, as I saw in the newspapers the Greek finance minister was telling that Greece debt is unsustainable. This means that at some point Greece will not be able to pay it. In this case, why do you think the lenders will be generous with Greece by providing more money? Why not get Greece out of Eurozone now before its debt will increase more. Greece may have its currency and pay whatever Syriza wants in welfare.
Dan-
Greece’s debt, as structured is unsustainable. It was unsustainable in 2010, and the bailout did nothing to change that, and, in fact, the extreme results of the austerity program worsened the inability to sustain the debt as structured. If Greece defaults, then little or none of that debt will be paid back. It’s not a matter of Greece’s debt increasing, which it really isn’t. It’s a situation where new loans were issued offered to pay off existing loans, but the structuring of the loans keep them unsustainable.
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That said, the primary purpose of the bailout, to begin with was not to “rescue” Greece, but to allow French and German banks to have their risky investments in Greek securities paid off with money loaned by the bailout institutions. No different than using one credit card to pay off another credit card. The last credit card company used will bear the burden if the customer defaults. Had Greece defaulted in 2010, the French and German Banking systems would have collapsed, requiring their respective governments to bail them out. If Greece were to default today, that same amount of money lost would be spread out over the entire EU, plus all the countries contribution to the IMF. In effect, the bailout allowed the burden voluntary and risky securities purchases of French and German banks to be involuntarily be placed on the shoulders of the rest of the world. Think about that.
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Further, in 2010, German banks faced another default problem amounting to billions resulting from risky loans to German shipping companies for ships that were going bankrupt. Had the German banking system had to absorb losses on Greek debt, the added weight of the reckless ship loans would have caused extreme havoc to Germany. Germany had to find a way to move the Greek debt off the books of her banks to prevent their banks from becoming totally illiquid. It’s all a matter of “creative accounting”, but an exercise the German government had to conduct to survive. After all, the government not only allowed German banks to make such risky loans, but passed unique laws that made risky ship loans easier to make.
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What the Syriza government has tried to do is be up front and honest about how much of a sham the bailout really has been. One would be hard pressed to find a respected economist who would disagree that the bailout, as structured, was wrong headed. Less austerity and a bit more debt reduction (haircut) in 2010 would have resulted in a wholly different story. Can the wrong headed bailout be fixed? Well, again most respected economists say it can, but not by continuing (or increasing) the level of austerity the lenders demand, and not without some restructuring of the debt. I’m talking about economists, not finance ministers who are generally not trained economists, but rather well placed members of their country’s ruling party.
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However, the lenders have too much political stake in austerity to listen to Nobel recognized economists. If an admission that austerity is not a cure all is made, that would definitely topple the ruling parties in Spain and Portugal, weaken the ruling party in Ireland, and very likely topple Merkel’s government. In short, it would be politically more beneficial to many players to have Greece default and cost their taxpayers billions than to admit the austerity program was ill advised. A Greek default can be used to put all the blame on the Greeks and deflect attention from the lender’s incompetence in designing the bailout in the first place. Why do you think the situation has been so propagandized?
Well, the situation is complex. I understand that there are different national/european interests, but the Greek debt was generated by the former Greek governments. Probably, the 2010 bailout was a mistake, and it were better to have Greece out from Eurozone at that time. I’m sorry that I have to say, but it is clear to me that not all European countries are qualified for Eurozone. Therefore, I do think that the best solution for EU is to have Greece out. I do think the problems are inside Greece and not outside it. I also think that the previous Greek government was more qualified (more experience) to finish the reform process. I respect Greek people choice (I’m not Greek), but I don’t understand why you choose a left party when the current Greece problems were generated by another left party (PASOK).
Good luck with solving your problems.
Basok was may be left in 1981 but today? How comes that “lefties” are boss of IMF? Just google for “IMF hunger revolts”
And there were no reforms, only “liberalizations” and cuts. Normally states perform reforms to halt a revolution, and so reforms are made for the people, what the capitalists call reforms is only good for the bosses and aims to enslave the people.
Meanwhile much more reforms were already made by SYRIZA than Basok had in 5 years: Prison-reform, citizenship for so called foreigners, the “hoodie law” got finally cancelled – the “left” Basok wanted to kill it in 2009 but forgot – healthcare-reform, measures against the humanitarian crisis that already killed thousands, aso
To “get Greece out” is too late, may be it would have been a good idea in 2010 but nobody really knows.
I have some friends that have no money to ever travel to Greece and sometimes they joke that for them Drachma would be great, as they then could afford to stay in Greece but as they believe that Drachma would not be good for the people in Greece, they are against it as they are against more humanitarian crisis and then hunger revolts, blood in the streets.
The minimum salary in Greece (684 euro) is almost 4 times than at your neighbor (e.g. Bulgaria-EU member 184 euro), so why SYRIZA is talking about “humanitarian crisis” in Greece and not in Bulgaria? I incline to think that this is just a pretext to not pay the debt, and ask for more money from international lenders to keep a living level which is artificially inflated by lending money in the past. Sincerely, I think Greece out from UE will be very good for both Greek and EU people.
P.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_in_Europe_by_minimum_wage
minim wage is 580euro gross since 2012.
and yes I think anyone brings here whatever comes in one’s mind.
I took the minimum wage from internet and provided the link. However, I saw in the SYRIZA proposal published above that they want to increase it to 780 euro by next year!!! It is clear that EU cannot accept this. You have no money to pay your debt, but you want to increase substantially your spending…No way! STYRZA proposal is a bluff and I hope the creditors will stop keeping a high Greek living standard using EU money.
the minimum wage is paid by employers of the private sector not the state.
Getting minimum wage back to it’s 2010 level to call “increasing” is rad.
Not rad is that it’s supported by Greek businessmen!
Beside that higher wages mean also more taxes…
Uii, this will be only understood by kindergarten-kids but as kindergarten developed to the American translation of Kita there seem to be more tutti pazzi than Schäuble in this country.
Just because Syriza’s takes about Bulgaria aren’t translated doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
Wow, minimum wagers can lend money to have party all the time.
Who believes such white lies, the receivers of public assistance in Central and North Europe? Nope, and that’s the reason they deeply hate the political class.
Guys, your “debt problem” was caused by Greek corrupt political class, not by EU. You should take the example from Romania (only 213 euro minimum wage). I just saw in news yesterday that their current prime minister (socialist) was named as suspect for money-laundering. Many other Romanian politicians are already in jail. When this will happen in Greece with your politicians who took big bonuses for the loans you cannot pay today? Your problem is inside Greece, not outside how your politicians want you to believe. Wake up!!!
When the Greek parliamentary enquiry committee was announced the whole German speaking media was screaming that this is the wrong time for stupid ideas like this, so the time is cool now?
That you don’t see nobody Greek being named in the news doesn’t mean that this isn’t happening or that there are no former ministers in jail but it would be nice to send some managers of German companies to join them but then again it’s getting very loud as you don’t want folks in the vein of Uli Hoeness to rot 25 years in a hell-hole.
Chistine???
is she missing?
Chris… I totally Agree with you..
Chapter X
Money printer