It looks as if the talks of Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras with French President Francois Hollande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel did not bring the expected results. That is that the International Monetary Fund stays out of the Greek program.
A day after the Tsipras-Merkel talks in Berlin, the Greek government lets know that Greece is willing to make a compromise on the IMF participation so that all sides are more or less satisfied. However, the Greek side sets one condition:
that the agreement will not contain the legislation in advance of austerity measures after 2018, as the IMF demands.
A high-ranking government official told journalists in Berlin
The IMF wants measures that are “politically unthinkable, socially damaging and economically irrational.”
We discuss a compromise “beyond this point”, the government source said. It should be understood by all parties involved that “the Greek government will not back down on this issue, no matter how much pressure it will be exposed to,” Athens News Agency reports.
Don’t worry .. the IMF is a spent force .. the face of banking on the global scale is set to change .. it will not be long now.
I really cannot understand why you think the IMF is dead. For a number of reasons, the IMF is an important global player in dealing with country debt. Without it, there is no mechanism to solve serious problems. That is not to say they are doing a good job — far from it — but the job they are supposed to be doing is important.
The IMF should never have got involved in the Greece crisis, and certainly not to the extent it has. This is a problem that the EuroZone should have solved themselves, but they won’t.
The IMF was brought in by France and Germany — Sarkozy in particular, as I recall. And it was the fault of Greece that Malakas Papandreou was allowed to go to France without a plan, without a single proposal, just asking France for several hundred billion euros! And the asshole’s explanation of what had happened? “I am prime minister of a country where nobody pays their taxes…”
This is where all the garbage come from — out of the mouth of Papandreou. And it is recycled daily by Germans and others, and is the main reason that Greece is now totally screwed. The actual debt was manageable, by politicians with brains and spines. Papandreou has neither, and Pasok were and remain nothing more than a wet dishcloth.
Well, Guest, although Geoffrey Pap is exactly what you describe, this is a small part of the reason Greece was destroyed. It was far more important to save the German and French banks and, along the way, loot a country as a free bonus once a convenient combination of traitor/idiot was in charge. The governments following Geoffrey’s, were swiftly paid out (bought) and set to continue the good work.
My point is that the only time when Greece had real leverage in this mess is when the French and German banks were on the verge of bankruptcy and Greece owed them money. A clever politician would have gone to Paris/Bonn with a set of demands and a plan: Pap went with nothing other than an empty head. What followed was inevitable: what sort of country hands over hundreds of billions of euros voluntarily? This was a power struggle of sorts, and Greece sent its stupidest citizen to negotiate? LOLOL
Ahem Berlin not Bonn. LOL
Two points here:
1) Pap cannot be solely classified as a Greek citizen – he has US and possibly Swedish citizenship too, so stupidity-wise these two countries can have a share of the …glory too!
2) A “clever politician” is a rare species, but even rarer is a non-corrupt politician. Pap was neither, therefore the result.