Analysis - If Greece falls, no one wants their prints on the murder weapon - page 2
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A Greek challenge for 'Mr Europe' Juncker
It's sultry early July and an emotional Jean-Claude Juncker is on the stump, calling for a 'Yes' vote in a referendum on which he says hangs the future of Europe - and his own career.
"A 'Yes' ... would have a significance ... well beyond Europe," he tells voters. "We can show we're getting moving again, that the process of European unification goes on."
Only, the EU chief executive isn't addressing Greeks before Sunday's vote. This was 2005 and Juncker was addressing his fellow Luxemburgers. As their prime minister, he was pleading for support in a referendum he had called - with no legal need - to demonstrate popular backing for an EU constitution. He won, and went on to serve another eight years.
The risks he ran then - puzzling to many - illustrate the depth of Juncker's engagement to a Europe he this week called the "love of my life" and a highly personal, emotional approach to politics that marked his efforts to broker a deal for Greece.
From the moment Juncker grabbed Alexis Tsipras by the hand and led the novice Greek prime minister away for instruction on his first visit to Brussels, to the Commission president's talk this week of feeling "betrayed" by the leftist leader 20 years his junior, the personal touch has marked a roller-coaster five months of mediation between Athens and its euro zone creditors.
But an approach that one Juncker acquaintance said was based on generating a "personal vibe" in the negotiating room, did not always please Athens' biggest creditor, Germany, which feared he was giving Greeks false hopes of securing easier loan terms.
That highlights risks for Juncker in taking on the EU leaders who appointed him last year to run a Union facing a web of crises - Greece and the euro, British threats to quit, Russian aggression, migration from the bloc's poor, violent neighbors.
PERSONAL ENGAGEMENT
"Juncker is a very skilled negotiator. He has incredible patience," said Jean-Jacques Rommes, the head of the Luxembourg employers federation UEL, who watched Juncker mediating on many occasions during his record-breaking 19 years as prime minister.
"He must be very upset at not succeeding," said Rommes. "If Greece leaves, it's clearly a reversal of something he sees as his life's work ... So politically, but also emotionally, everything is driving him not to give up on Greece."
EU officials describe Juncker taking a paternal, "pedagogic" interest in Tsipras, explaining to him how EU negotiations work and the need for technical talks not just political deals. One recalled a meeting when Tsipras arrived without experts; Juncker sat the Greek leader down at a computer and insisted he "get his numbers right" before there was any point in further discussion.
On one occasion, Juncker greeted the younger man for the cameras with a cheery welcome to the "torture room".
As late as Monday night, 24 hours before Athens defaulted, Juncker texted Tsipras a 5-point plan he hoped could clinch a deal and persuade him to seek a 'Yes' vote, one EU source said.
Giving vent a couple of days later to his frustrations over the "ridiculous" behavior of the Greek government, EU lawmakers said he told them he deserved a "Nobel Prize for patience".
Such personal engagement won Juncker fair reviews from Greek officials whose left-wing views are less alien to Juncker than to many fellow conservatives. Long leader of a coalition with socialists, his political roots among Luxembourg's steel mills lie on the left of the spectrum of European Christian Democrats.
And Juncker, who proclaims an unembarrassed "love" for the Greek people, seems genuinely motivated to help, keeping an ear to the ground throughout Greece's austerity pain by means of regular calls to a small number of personal acquaintances.
Feedback from sources around Socialist French President Francois Hollande, whose former finance minister is EU economics commissioner, has also been positive for the multilingual Juncker, who sees Luxembourg as a bridge between Fran
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Merkel: Europe has seen some of its most dramatic days
Merkel kicks of the parliamentary session ahead of Greek bailout vote
She's getting a rousing round of applause but there's a few not joining in
Not interested
And she's done
Now every Tom, Deitcher and Hansel will have their say
How Goldman Sachs Profited From Greece
The Greek debt crisis offers another illustration of Wall Street’s powers of persuasion and predation, although the Street is missing from most accounts.
The crisis was exacerbated years ago by a deal with Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS), engineered by Goldman’s current CEO, Lloyd Blankfein.
Blankfein and his Goldman team helped Greece hide the true extent of its debt, and in the process almost doubled it. And just as with the American subprime crisis, and the current plight of many American cities, Wall Street’s predatory lending played an important although little-recognized role.
Trouble Ahead
In 2001, Greece was looking for ways to disguise its mounting financial troubles. The Maastricht Treaty required all eurozone member states to show improvement in their public finances, but Greece was heading in the wrong direction.
Then Goldman Sachs came to the rescue, arranging a secret loan of 2.8 billion euros for Greece, disguised as an off-the-books “cross-currency swap” -- a complicated transaction in which Greece’s foreign-currency debt was converted into a domestic-currency obligation using a fictitious market exchange rate.
As a result, about 2 percent of Greece’s debt magically disappeared from its national accounts. Christoforos Sardelis, then head of Greece’s Public Debt Management Agency, later described the deal to Bloomberg Business as “a very sexy story between two sinners.”
For its services, Goldman received a whopping 600 million euros ($793 million), according to Spyros Papanicolaou, who took over from Sardelis in 2005. That came to about 12 percent of Goldman’s revenue from its giant trading and principal-investments unit in 2001, which posted record sales that year. The unit was run by Blankfein.
Then the deal turned sour. After the 9/11 attacks, bond yields plunged, resulting in a big loss for Greece because of the formula Goldman had used to compute the country’s debt repayments under the swap. By 2005, Greece owed almost double what it had put into the deal, pushing its off-the-books debt from 2.8 billion euros to 5.1 billion.
In 2005, the deal was restructured and that 5.1 billion euros in debt locked in. Perhaps not incidentally, Mario Draghi, now head of the European Central Bank and a major player in the current Greek drama, was then managing director of Goldman’s international division.
The Sinners Are Much More Fun
Greece wasn’t the only sinner. Until 2008, European Union accounting rules allowed member nations to manage their debt with so-called off-market rates in swaps, pushed by Goldman and other Wall Street banks. In the late 1990s, JPMorgan (NYSE:JPM) enabled Italy to hide its debt by swapping currency at a favorable exchange rate, thereby committing Italy to future payments that didn’t appear on its national accounts as future liabilities.
But Greece was in the worst shape and Goldman was the biggest enabler. Undoubtedly, Greece suffers from years of corruption and tax avoidance by its wealthy. But Goldman wasn’t an innocent bystander: It padded its profits by leveraging Greece to the hilt -- along with much of the rest of the global economy. Other Wall Street banks did the same. When the bubble burst, all that leveraging pulled the world economy to its knees.
Even with the global economy reeling from Wall Street’s excesses, Goldman offered Greece another gimmick. In early November 2009, three months before the country’s debt crisis became global news, a Goldman team proposed a financial instrument that would push the debt from Greece’s healthcare system far into the future. This time, though, Greece didn’t bite.
As we know, Wall Street got bailed out by American taxpayers. And in subsequent years, the banks became profitable again and repaid their bailout loans. Bank shares have gone through the roof. Goldman’s were trading at $53 a share in November 2008; they’re now worth over $200. Executives at Goldman and other Wall Street banks have enjoyed huge pay packages and promotions. Blankfein, now Goldman’s CEO, raked in $24 million last year alone.
Meanwhile, the people of Greece struggle to buy medicine and food.
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More than half of Germans think planned Greek deal is bad: poll
More than half of Germans think the planned deal with Greece is bad and many would have preferred that the crisis-stricken country left the euro zone rather than getting the chance for further aid, according to an opinion poll.
Lawmakers in Germany, the biggest contributor to euro zone bailouts, on Friday gave their go-ahead for the currency bloc to negotiate a third bailout for Greece that could total 86 billion euros ($93 billion) over three years.
In the YouGov survey seen by German newspaper Welt am Sonntag, 56 percent of respondents said they thought the plan for such a deal with Greece was bad, with just over one fifth of those saying it was very bad.
Only 2 percent deemed it to be positive while another 27 percent said they thought it was somewhat positive.
The poll of 1,380 Germans showed there was a lack of enthusiasm in Europe's largest economy about the result of Friday's vote, Welt am Sonntag said on Sunday, adding that the poll showed 48 percent of Germans would have liked to see Greece quit the euro zone.
Only a third clearly said they wanted the country to remain a member of the single currency bloc, the newspaper said.
A separate survey by pollster Forsa published on Friday showed that 53 percent of German voters had wanted parliament to back the negotiations, with 42 percent against.
source
greek bailuot
haha
greek voted NO
then theyve got some money about 7b euro
today expires the payment of 6,8 b euro
What is going on there ???
Varoufakis: Planned parallel bank system, says Schaeuble wants Grexit to "terrorise"
More shocking revelations from Greece
elathimerini.com are running a story in which Varoufakis claims he was given approval by PM Tsipras to plan a possible parallel banking system that would hijack the tax registration numbers of firms and citizens by hacking the General Secretariat of Public Revenues. He also dishes the dirt on his rift with German finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble
The plan was apparently proposed a month before Tsipras and his Syriza party won the general elections in January.
The new payment system was to run in euros but with the ability to switch to Drachmas overnight if needed and was to be used to bypass the bank closures and controls
To hack the government website Varoufakis says he asked one of his childhood friends, an IT expert who was also a professor at Columbia University. The website was being monitored by the Troika and a week after Varoufakis became finance minister his mate phoned to say he had control of the hardware but not the software that was under the control of the Troika
These details have emerged from a telephone conference call between Varoufakis and international hedge funds and was brokered by former UK Chancellor Norman Lamont on July 16th, a week after he'd left his post as finance minister.
ekathimerini have some of the transcript from that conversation that was recorded with his knowledge;
Varoufakis "We don't have a currency which we can devalue vis a vis the euro, we have the euro"
"[Wolfgang] Schaeuble, the finance minister of Germany, is hell-bent on effecting a Grexit so nothing is over. But let me be very specific and very precise on this. The prime minister before he became PM, before we won the election in January, had given me the green light to come up with a Plan B. And I assembled a very able team, a small team as it had to be because that had to be kept completely under wraps for obvious reasons. And we had been working since the end of December or beginning of January on creating one. "
"But let me give you an example. We were planning along a number fronts. I will just mention one. Take the case of the first few moments when the banks are shut, the ATMs don't function and there has to be some parallel payment system by which to keep the economy going for a little while, to give the population the feel that the state is in control and that there is a plan."
"We were planning to create, surreptitiously, reserve accounts attached to every tax file number, without telling anyone, just to have this system in a function under wraps. And, at the touch of a button, to allow us to give PIN numbers to tax file number holders, to taxpayers.
That would have created a parallel banking system while the banks were shut as a result of the ECBs aggressive action to deny us some breathing space."
"Ok, so problem number one: The general secretary of information systems on the other hand was controlled by me, as minister. I appointed a good friend of mine, a childhood friend of mine who had become professor of IT at Columbia University in the States and so on. I put him in because I trusted him to develop this."
"At some point, a week or so after we moved into the ministry, he calls me up and says to me: "You know what? I control the machines, I control the hardware but I do not control the software. The software belongs to the troika controlled General Secretary of Public Revenues. What do I do?""
"So we had meeting just two of us - nobody else knew - and he said: "Listen, if I ask for permission from them to start implementing this program then the troika will immediately know we are designing a parallel system." But I said: "That won't do, we don't want to reveal our hand at this stage.""
"So I authorised him - and you can't tell anyone that, this is totally between us..."
Normal Lamont interrupts: "There are certainly others listening but they will not tell it to their friends."
Varoufakis (laughing): "I know. I know they are. And even if they do I will deny I said it, so we decided to hack into my ministry's own software program in order to be able break it up to just copy just to copy the code of the tax systems website onto a large computer in his office so that he can work out how to design and implement this parallel payment system."
"And we were ready to get the green light from the PM when the banks closed in order to move into the General Secretariat of Public Revenues, which is not controlled by us but is controlled by Brussels, and to plug this laptop in and to energize the system."
On Schaeuble
"Schaeuble has a plan. The way he described it to me is very simple. He believes that the eurozone is not sustainable as it is. He believes there has to be some fiscal transfers, some degree of political union. He believes that for that political union to work without federation, without the legitimacy that a properly elected federal parliament can render, can bestow upon an executive, it will have to be done in a very disciplinary way. And he said explicitly to me that a Grexit is going to equip him with sufficient bargaining, sufficient terrorising power in order to impose upon the French that which Paris has been resisting. And what is that? A degree of transfer of budget making powers from Paris to Brussels."
It's no surprise that Greece was looking into a plan B but this is the sort of stuff Hollywood writers would be proud of. Added to what Varoufakis may have in the form of recorded meetings with the Eurogroup, this could be very embarrassing and damaging to Greece and the whole of Europe
The full ekathimerini story is here
Greek government says poring over draft of third bailout agreement
Greek government officials are poring over a draft of the country's third bailout agreement drawn up on the basis of discussions with EU/IMF lenders, a government official said on Saturday, boosting hopes a deal could be wrapped up in days.
Athens is racing to wrap up the bailout agreement of as much as 86 billion euros ($94.35 billion) by as early as Tuesday in a bid to get the first disbursement of aid by Aug. 20, when it faces a debt payment to the European Central Bank.
Officials from European Union and International Monetary Fund lenders met Greece's finance and economy ministers in Athens on Saturday after EU finance officials held a teleconference on Friday and noted progress in the talks.
"The discussion today has to do with the prior actions for the first disbursement," the government official said. "Tomorrow, the focus of the talks will be on the more controversial issues in the bailout agreement."
Greece narrowly dodged a euro zone exit last month after months of acrimonious negotiations that culminated with Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras clinching a deal tied to stringent austerity and reform terms to avoid economic collapse.
Since then negotiations on the agreement itself - which will spell out details of the reforms and funds to be disbursed - have proceeded remarkably smoothly, with the lenders praising Greece for its cooperation.
The view of EU officials on Friday's conference call was that talks are proceeding well and may be completed over the weekend, one source familiar with the matter said.
If a draft memorandum of understanding and an updated debt sustainability analysis are ready as planned on Tuesday, the Greek government and parliament would be expected to approve them by Thursday.
This would open the way for euro zone finance ministers to meet or hold a teleconference on Friday to endorse the up to 86 billion euro three-year loan program for Athens.
Greece would be expected to enact another package of reform legislation before Aug. 20, in parallel with national ratification procedures to receive a first aid payment in time to meet the ECB payment.
source
They are writing what they are told to write
They became a slave country in just one week of one moronic leaders stupid decisions
Greece To Hold New Elections On September 20
Update: Local media is reporting that Greeks will indeed head back to the polls next month, as Tsipras will call for new elections.
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Greek PM Tsipras to resign on Thursday: government official
Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras will submit his resignation to the country's president later Thursday to clear the way for early elections on Sept. 20, a government official said.
Tspiras, elected in January, is expected to make a televised state address on Thursday evening.
Tsipras effectively lost his parliamentary majority after a rebellion by hardliners in his Syriza party who oppose a bailout agreement struck with international lenders.