Greece: Tsipras Surrenders to Troika Bandits

[Oscar]

Greece: Tsipras Surrenders to Troika Bandits

[ http://www.globalresearch.ca/greece-tsi ... ts/5462271 ]

By Stephen Lendman Global Research, July 13, 2015

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Greece is again occupied, a Troika controlled colony, its sovereignty lost. Tsipras is a modern-day quisling – selling out to monied interests disgracefully. He’ll be remembered for agreeing to a Greek Versailles.

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Greece is being systematically raped and pillaged. It’s painful to see how easily powerful monied interests can destroy a nation without firing a shot. Financial war is as cruel and ruthless as naked aggression.

Long-suffering Greeks understand better than establishment economists – paid to con people to believe destructive policies benefit them.

Harder than ever hard times awaits Greeks and ordinary people throughout Western societies. Regimes in Europe and America serve their privileged elites alone at the expense of most others, especially their most vulnerable and needy.

Their governments are their worst enemies – in bed with dark forces destroying their welfare and futures. SYRIZA was elected on a pledge of no more austerity. Betrayal followed. It’s just a question of how bad things will be once the dust settles. What’s happening isn’t pretty.

On Sunday, Eurogroup president/Dutch finance minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem gave Greece the Troika’s take-it-or-leave-it harsh ultimatum – a list of stiffer austerity measures than earlier proposed and other tough ones as a condition for more bailout help – now reportedly for 86 – 87 billion euros over three years (10 billion euros immediately for bank recapitalizations).

Greece’s parliament must approve the deal and legislate Troika diktats into law with Tsipras’ signature by July 15. Terms agreed on include:

Higher regressive VAT taxes hitting millions of impoverished Greeks hardest along with broadening the tax base affecting ordinary people most.

Stiff pension cuts (on top of 40% eliminated earlier) including for poor retirees cut no slack.

Adopting a Code of Civil Procedure to streamline procedures and reduce costs – in other words, continued stiff budget cuts harming millions of Greeks already suffering hugely from earlier imposed austerity.

Full implementation of the Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union’s key provisions – including mandated spending cuts gutting social services more than already.

Giving foreign investors freer access to plunder Greece’s economy.

Privatizing power generation and transmission along with other state enterprises previously off-limits.

Neutralizing labor rights ahead of eliminating them altogether – including restricting collective bargaining and right to strike as well as eliminating hiring and firing restrictions.

Rescinding SYRIZA enacted laws not agreed on by the European Commission, ECB and IMF.

Transferring up to 50 billion euros worth of Greek assets to a Troika controlled fund based in Athens to contribute to servicing debt and recapitalizing Greek banks.

Possible debt restructuring by extending maturities, not write-downs.

Troika officials will monitor Greek implementation of demands.

Bottom line: they mandate Athens entirely surrendering its sovereign rights to the European Commission, ECB and IMF.

Greater than ever austerity will be imposed, hitting millions of impoverished/unemployed Greeks hardest, including poor pensioners to receive less than their already meager payments en route to eliminating them altogether.

Privatizing state enterprises earlier considered off-limits. Plans are to transform Greece into an nightmarish dystopian wasteland.

It’s hard imagining any government accepting what’s demanded. No responsible one would. Tsipras sold out. His signature on the final deal alone awaits.

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Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III. http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com. Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network. It airs three times weekly: live on Sundays at 1PM Central time plus two prerecorded archived programs.

[Oscar]

Grexit or Jubilee? How Greek Debt Could Be Annulled

[ http://ellenbrown.com/2015/07/14/grexit ... -annulled/ ]

July 14, 2015 at 6:59 pm Ellen Brown
Tags : debt jubilee, EU, Greek crisis, Grexit, public banking

The crushing Greek debt could be canceled the way it was made – by sleight of hand. But saving the Greek people and their economy is evidently not in the game plan of the Eurocrats.

Greece’s creditors have finally brought the country to its knees, forcing President Alexis Tsipras to agree to austerity and privatization. No write-down of Greece’s debt was included in the deal, although the IMF has warned that the current debt is unsustainable.

Former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis calls the deal “a new Versailles Treaty” and “the politics of humiliation.” Greek defense minister Panos Kammenos calls it a “coup d’état” done by “blackmailing the Greek prime minister with collapse of the banks and a complete haircut on deposits.”

“Blackmail” is not too strong a word. The European Central Bank has turned off its liquidity tap for Greece’s banks, something all banks need, as explained earlier here. All banks are technically insolvent, lending money they don’t have. They don’t lend their deposits but create deposits when they make loans, as the Bank of England recently confirmed. When the depositors and borrowers come for their money at the same time, the bank must borrow from other banks; and if that liquidity runs dry, the bank turns to the central bank, the lender of last resort empowered to create money at will. Without the central bank’s backstop, banks must steal from their depositors with “haircuts” or they will collapse.

What did Greece do to deserve this coup d’état? According to former World Bank economist Peter Koenig:

[T]he Greek people, the citizens of a sovereign country . . . have had the audacity to democratically elect a socialist government. Now they have to suffer. They do not conform to the self-imposed rules of the neoliberal empire of unrestricted globalized privatization of public services and public properties from which the elite is maximizing profits – for themselves, of course. It is outright theft of public property.

According to a July 5th article titled “Greece – The One Biggest Lie You’re Being Told By The Media,” the country did not fail on its own. It was made to fail: [ https://truthandsatire.wordpress.com/20 ... the-media/ ]

[T]he banks wrecked the Greek government, and then deliberately pushed it into unsustainable debt . . . while revenue-generating public assets were sold off to oligarchs and international corporations.

A Truth Committee convened by the Greek parliament reported in June that a major portion of the country’s €320 billion debt is “illegal, illegitimate and odious” and should not be paid.

MORE:

[ http://ellenbrown.com/2015/07/14/grexit ... -annulled/ ]

[Oscar]

Varoufakis slams 'new Versailles' Greek bailout

[ http://www.ekathimerini.com/199565/arti ... ek-bailout ]

July 15, 2015

Former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis told parliament on Wednesday Greece's rescue deal was like the Versailles treaty which forced crushing reparations on Germany after World War One and led to the rise of Adolf Hitler.

Varoufakis, whose fiery language alienated many of his eurozone colleagues during five months of negotiations, resigned after Greeks rejected bailout terms in a July 5 referendum in order to facilitate talks. A deal was reached one week later.

"' 'The powerful demanded that the losers accept terms they had no right to demand. The losers accepted commitments they had no right to accept'. These were the words of John Maynard Keynes on the Versailles Treaty. What we are confronted with is a new Versailles Treaty," the self-avowed "erratic Marxist" told fellow lawmakers ahead of a vote on the rescue deal.

He did not say if he would vote against it or if he would even attend the key vote expected after midnight - last week he skipped a vote on giving Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras a mandate to negotiate a deal.

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Varoufakis noted in a blog on Tuesday that he had warned of the risks of "a new Versailles treaty" when the first Greek bailout was negotiated in 2010.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel was asked at a news conference after Monday's accord whether it was not reminiscent of the 1919 Versailles treaty reparations.

She tried to make light of the question, saying she would not take part in historical comparisons, "especially when I didn't make them myself".

[Oscar]

SYRIZA committee members slam Greece agreement

[ http://www.ekathimerini.com/199552/arti ... -agreement ]

July 15, 2015

More than half of the governing left-wing SYRIZA party's central committee has signed a statement slamming the agreement Greece reached with its European creditors earlier this week, describing it as a coup against their nation by European leaders.

The statement, signed by 109 of the committee's 201 members, says the agreement was "the result of threats of immediate financial strangulation"and is a new bailout with "humiliating terms of supervision, destructive for our country and its people."

Greece's parliament is expected to vote Wednesday on the austerity bill required to get a new bailout package. [ . . .]

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French MPs overwhelmingly back Greece bailout deal

[ http://www.ekathimerini.com/199564/arti ... ilout-deal ]

July 15, 2015

French MPs overwhelmingly backed the new Greek bailout agreement on Wednesday, with Prime Minister Manuel Valls saying it was the only route out of the crisis.

The lower house National Assembly backed the agreement by 412 votes to 69, with Valls saying: "We are demanding a lot of the Greeks, not just to punish it, but to accompany it through a vital economic recovery."

[Oscar]

Greece debt crisis: Eurozone deal laws backed by MPs

[ http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-33535205 ]

July 15, 2015

Greek MPs have approved tough economic measures required to enable an €86bn eurozone bailout deal to go ahead.

The legislation includes tax rises and an increase in the retirement age.

Two hundred and twenty nine lawmakers voted Yes, 64 voted No and six abstained. Half of the No votes came from the governing Syriza party.

Ahead of the vote, protesters threw petrol bombs at police during an anti-austerity protest close to parliament, and police responded with tear gas.

Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras had said he did not believe in the deal, but nonetheless urged MPs to approve the measures.
Alexis Tsipras said Greek people understood it was better to fight in an unfair fight than hand in your weapons
Speaker Zoe Constantopoulo said it was a 'very black day for democracy'

He said he was willing to implement the "irrational" proposals to avoid the collapse of the banks and disaster for Greece.

MORE:

[ http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-33535205 ]

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Behind the Mask of Democracy Lurks European Tyranny

[ http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/07/13/ ... n-tyranny/ ]

July 13, 2015 by John Wight

Events in Greece have succeeded in ripping the mask of democracy off the face of the EU to reveal a cold, callous, and brutal tyranny of blind economic forces.

Not since the end of the Second World War has a people and nation in Western Europe been forced to endure the economic hardship and privation that Greece and its people are suffering today. The fact that such privation is being delivered as a clear violation of democracy and national sovereignty is evidence that the values of freedom and human rights for which so many sacrificed their lives in World War II are still to be won in Western Europe.

The state of siege that has been inflicted on this southern European nation of 11 million people by an economic order and its political institutions, which together amount to a juggernaut, has removed any last vestige of pretence as to the true nature of Western democracy. It does not serve the masses of the people, it rules over them in the interests of global economic forces that brook no dissent or defiance to their writ, in the face of which no border, no culture, and no democratic mandate is sacred.

The choice presented to the Greek Government, led by its prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, was the choice between `bad´ and
`catastrophic´. With the country facing a shortage of food and medicines, Tsipras was left with little alternative but to accept the demands of the Troika of a package of austerity reforms in order to release a further instalment of emergency bailout funds from
the European Central Bank.

For those advocating `Grexit´, Greece´s departure from the euro and Eurozone, the words of the country´s former finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, should make sober reading. As he wrote in the UK Guardian newspaper recently: "To exit, we would have to create a new currency from scratch. In occupied Iraq, the introduction of new paper money took almost a year, 20 or so Boeing 747s, the mobilization of the US military´s might, three printing firms and hundreds of trucks. In the absence of such support, Grexit would be the equivalent of announcing a large devaluation more than 18 months in advance: a recipe for liquidating all Greek capital stock and transferring it abroad by any means available."

Such a transition would also bring with it the very real prospect of the emergence of the neo-fascist forces of Golden Dawn, with
undoubtedly ugly consequences. Greece is a country with a tortured history of social convulsion and chaos, and it would be folly to underestimate the possibility of it returning. Revolution, led presumably by the Greek Communist Party (KKE) would mean socialism in one country, which in the context of Greece in 2015, standing in a sea of neoliberalism and neoliberal institutions that would be committed to its still-birth, is a non-starter.

It is clear by now that the entire premise of a European single currency was fatally flawed at inception. Rather than promote and
ensure economic stability and prosperity for its members, it has proved a ball and chain for peripheral European economies such as Greece, who made the fatal mistake of signing up to it. For Greece, Portugal, Ireland, and Spain the single currency had reduced them to a state of slavery, unable to govern according to the democratic wishes and social needs of their own citizens, instead suborning their independence to an international banking and financial system that is accountable to no one and nothing apart from shareholders and investors.

German chancellor, Angela Merkel, has played a particularly onerous role in this affair, confirming that her priority is to serve the interests of German banks than a united Europe when push comes to shove. What she forgets as she lectures Greece on its fiscal irresponsibility is that without a Greek trade deficit there would be no German trade surplus; and that a trade surplus can only come with investment.

MORE:

[ http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/07/13/ ... n-tyranny/ ]

[Oscar]

Beppe: Nationalize Banks to Throw Off 'Anti-Democratic Straitjacket' of Eurozone

[ http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/0 ... t-eurozone ]

by Deirdre Fulton, staff writer Published on Friday, July 24, 2015 by Common Dreams

Populist comedian-turned-politician calls for Italy to exit the Euro

Longtime critic of the Eurozone's destructive commitment to austerity, Italian comedian-turned-political activist Beppe Grillo has launched what one news outlet called a "full-throated attack" on the single currency, saying his country should throw off that "anti-democratic straitjacket" by nationalizing its banks and taking a stronger stance against the demands of elite financial interests.

Grillo, who the Guardian says "transformed Italian politics when he launched his anti-establishment Five Star Movement in 2009," called for Italy to exit the Euro in order to guard against the threat of bankruptcy and German-imposed austerity.

In comments written at his blog, Grillo criticized Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras while comparing Germany's conduct during recent bailout negotiations to "explicit Nazism." He said that in the wake of the Greek crisis, Italy should be prepared to use its whopping debt as a weapon against foreign creditors.

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In his blog post, Grillo also took a broad swipe at the U.S. trade agenda, suggesting the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) "would turn Europe into a subject of the U.S. in the same way Europe had become a subject of Germany," according to the Guardian.

As the Financial Times reports, the Five Star Movement "has been rising steadily in the polls since March" and currently enjoys the support of nearly 25 percent of Italian voters.

[Oscar]

What Next After Tsipras Dashed Schäuble’s Hopes For Grexit?

[ http://www.socialeurope.eu/2015/07/next ... es-grexit/ ]

by Frank Hoffer on 27 July 2015

Excerpt:

A Greek government forced to bow to the impossible, a referendum brushed aside, the Franco-German partnership damaged, European compromise diplomacy replaced by ultimatums, the euro in limbo, large parts of Europe swept by anti-German fear and resentment and another €83bn sunk into a doomed “rescue package”. Not quite how successful policies are supposed to play out.

The worst thing about German policy is not that it is harsh and uncompromising towards the “reform-shy” Greeks, but that it is wrongheaded. Instead of sustainable debt restructuring and support for real investment in order to gain the time and acceptance needed for difficult and sometimes lengthy structural reforms, the Greeks have once again been prescribed more of the same: keep cutting till you collapse. Pursuing this failed policy with Swabian thoroughness and Prussian rigour has made Wolfgang Schäuble a popular figure at home and an unloved German martinet abroad. In Europe, this policy has done much to destroy confidence in, and respect for, Germany.

. . . . .

Either Europe will be based on democracy and solidarity or there will be no Europe. The idea that European integration can be achieved by competition, through supranationally institutionalized market power, is an illusion harboured by technocratic dreamers. Reality cannot fit into the Maastricht corset. There is no escaping the need for deeper economic and political union if the single currency is to be preserved.

Germany now threatens to stray from the successful path of integrationist modesty and pragmatic solutions. But that is not a foregone conclusion, nor is it an unavoidable by-product of greater power. Rather, it is a mistake. It is never too late to shift course.

MORE:

[ http://www.socialeurope.eu/2015/07/next ... es-grexit/ ]

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Frank Hoffer is senior research officer at the Bureau for Workers' Activities of the ILO. He writes in a personal capacity.

[Oscar]

Tsipras and Varoufakis Approve of Home Evictions and Expropriation of Depositors

[ http://www.globalresearch.ca/tsipras-an ... rs/5464886 ]

By Ernst Wolff Global Research, July 27, 2015

During their election campaign, the Syriza movement promised the people of Greece an end to the inhumane politics of austerity and the dictatorship of the Troika.

After being elected in January, Prime Minister Tsipras and his Finance Minister Varoufakis negotiated with the EU commission, the ECB and the IMF for almost five months. While fulfilling almost all of their financial demands, Syriza’s leaders openly criticized the “institutions” for their tough bargaining and resisted some of their harshest measures.

At the beginning of July, the Troika tightened its grip on Greece. Tsipras and Varoufakis in return called for a referendum in which the people of Greece took a very clear stance and said “no” to the continuation of austerity politics.

Rather than fulfill this mandate, Tsipras responded with a 180-degree turnaround. He dismissed his finance minister, went to Brussels and accepted the most far-reaching austerity measures ever imposed on his country.

Meanwhile Tsipras has survived two votes in the Greek parliament with the support of exactly those forces whom he once called his political adversaries. He has also removed all those members from his cabinet that were unwilling to follow his new course.

Last Wednesday, both Tsipras and his former finance minister went even further by giving their consent to a reform package that will facilitate foreclosures and home evictions. Given the disastrous economic situation, high unemployment and the ongoing capital controls, thousands of home owners will fall into arrears with their interest and repayment installments in the coming months and thus become victims of this new legislation, which will go into effect on 1 January 2016.

Tsipras and Varoufakis, who loved posing as the advocates of the common people during their election campaign, are thus frankly siding with collecting agencies and openly turning their backs on working people strangled by debt.

However, there was worse to come in Wednesday’s vote. Pretending to “protect “Greek taxpayers, Tsipras and Varoufakis also gave their consent to the EU’s Bank Recovery and Resolution Directive (BRRD). This legislation provides for the replacement of bailouts of banks with taxpayers’ money by the partial expropriation of savers, depositors and shareholders.

To understand the true nature of a bail-in, one only has to take a look at what happened in Cyprus in the spring of 2013. There, depositors with more than 100,000 euros in their accounts lost 40 percent of their money, which was used to ’recapitalize’ their bank. The measure was a devastating blow for the middle class, small businesses and retirees who lost a large part of their lifetime savings.

MORE:

[ http://www.globalresearch.ca/tsipras-an ... rs/5464886 ]

[Oscar]

Argentina Could Show Greece A Way Out Of Its Crisis

[ http://www.socialeurope.eu/2015/08/arge ... ay-crisis/ ]

by Alan Cibils on 3 August 2015

The Greek debt bailout and austerity saga, including the recent agreement between Greece and the Euro Summit, has important parallels with the Argentine experience of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Even given country specific differences, these similarities are relevant to the choices facing Greeks today.

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Argentina’s experience is relevant for Greece today, despite differences between their economies. The “Euro Summit Statement’s” neoliberal economic mandate will not take Greece to debt sustainability, as even the IMF acknowledges. It is more likely to deepen the Greek crisis, worsening already devastated social and economic conditions.

Defaulting and recovering monetary sovereignty were key for Argentina’s recovery. When creditors are inflexible, it is up to the debtor nation to act based on its best interest. Policy priorities should shift from servicing the financial sector to dealing with economic growth and social demands.

It may be a good time for Greece to re-evaluate the costs and benefits of belonging to the monetary union. Are the Greek people, economy and productive structure better off as a result of eurozone membership? Perhaps a good use of the time bought by the current bailout is to prepare diligently for the implementation of Plan B.

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Alan Cibils is Professor of Economics at the Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento, Buenos Aires, Argentina where he is also chairman of the Political Economy Department. His fields of interest are theories of economic development, monetary theory and policy and financial regulation and integration.

[Oscar]

The Defeat of Europe

[ http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/08/05/ ... of-europe/ ]

by Vanis Varoufakis August 5, 2015 Athens.

In 2010 the Greek state lost the capacity to service its debt. Put simply, it became insolvent and thus lost access to capital markets. To prevent a default on fragile French and German banks that had irresponsibly lent billions to irresponsible Greek governments, Europe decided to grant Greece the biggest loan in world history on condition of the largest ever fiscal consolidation (better known as austerity) which, naturally, resulted in a world-record loss of national income — the greatest since the Great Depression. And so began a vicious cycle of austerity-driven debt deflation, spearheading a humanitarian crisis and a complete inability to repay the nation’s debts.

For five years the troika of Greece’s official lenders (the International Monetary Fund, European Central Bank and European Commission, representing creditor member-states) were committed to this dead-end strategy that financiers label “extend and pretend”: lending to an insolvent debtor more and more money in order to avoid having to write off a bad debt. The more the creditors insisted on this strategy, the greater the damage to Greece’s social economy, the less reformable Greece became, and the larger the creditors’ losses.

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Defeated friends, defeated Europe

Perhaps the most dispiriting experience was to be an eyewitness to the humiliation of the Commission and of the few friendly, well-meaning finance ministers. To be told by people holding high office in the Commission and in the French government that “the Commission must defer to the Eurogroup’s president”, or that “France is not what it used to be”, made me almost weep. To hear the German finance minister say, on 8 June, in his office, that he had no advice for me on how to prevent an accident that would be tremendously costly for Europe as a whole, disappointed me.

By the end of June, we had given ground on most of the troika’s demands — with one exception: we insisted on a mild debt restructuring that would involve no haircuts, and smart debt swaps. On 25 June I attended my penultimate Eurogroup meeting where I was presented with the troika’s “take it or leave it” offer. Having met the troika nine tenths of the way, we were expecting them to move towards us a little, to allow for something resembling an honourable agreement. Instead, they backtracked in relation to their own, previous position (on VAT). Clearly they were demanding that we capitulate in a manner that demonstrated our humiliation to the whole world, offering us a deal that, if we had accepted it, would have destroyed what was left of Greece’s social economy.

The following day, Prime Minister Tsipras announced that the troika’s ultimatum would be put to the Greek people in a referendum. A day later, on Friday 27 June, I attended my last Eurogroup meeting, which put in train the foretold closure of Greece’s banks — a form of punishment for our audacity in consulting our people.

In that meeting, Dijsselbloem announced that he was about to convene a second meeting later that evening, without me: without Greece being represented. I protested that he could not, of his own accord, exclude the finance minister of a eurozone member state, and I asked for legal advice.

After a short break, the advice came from the Secretariat: “The Eurogroup does not exist in European law. It is an informal group and, therefore, there are no written rules to constrain its President.” In my mind, that was the epitaph of the Europe that Adenauer, de Gaulle, Brandt, Giscard d’Estaing, Schmidt, Kohl, Mitterrand, etc had worked towards. Of the Europe that I had always thought of, ever since I was a teenager, as my point of reference, my compass.

A week or so later, despite the closed banks and the scaremongering of the corrupt Greek media, the people of Greece delivered a resounding no in the referendum. On the following day the Euro Summit responded by imposing on our prime minister an agreement that can only be described as our government’s terms of surrender. And the weapon of choice? The illegal threat of severing Greece from the eurozone.

Whatever one thinks of our government, this episode will go down in European history as the moment when official Europe, using institutions and methods that no treaty legitimised (the Eurogroup, the Euro Summit, the threat of eviction from the eurozone), dealt a major blow to the ideal of an ever-closer democratic union. Greece capitulated, but it is Europe that was defeated.

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Vanis Varoufakis is Greece’s former finance minister and a member of the Greek parliament.


Notes.

(1) Editor’s note: meeting of the finance ministers of the 19 countries of the eurozone.

This article appears in the excellent Le Monde Diplomatique, whose English language edition can be found at mondediplo.com. [ http://mondediplo.com/ ] This full text appears by agreement with Le Monde Diplomatique. CounterPunch features two or three articles from LMD every month.

[Oscar]

Six Key Lessons The IMF Ignored In The Euro Crisis

[ http://www.socialeurope.eu/2015/07/six- ... ro-crisis/ ]

by Ngaire Woods on 28 July 2015

Over the last few decades, the International Monetary Fund has learned six important lessons about how to manage government debt crises. In its response to the crisis in Greece, however, each of these lessons has been ignored.

The Fund´s participation in the effort to rescue the eurozone may have raised its profile and gained it favor in Europe. But its failure, and the failure of its European shareholders, to adhere to its own best practices may eventually prove to have been a fatal misstep.

EXCERPT (. . . summarized. Ed.):

- One key lesson ignored in the Greece debacle is that when a bailout becomes necessary, it should be done once and definitively.

- Another lesson that was ignored is not to bail out the banks.

- The third lesson that the IMF was unable to apply in Greece is that austerity often leads to a vicious cycle, as spending cuts cause the economy to contract far more than it would have otherwise.

- Fourth, the IMF has learned that reforms are most likely to be implemented when they are few in number and carefully focused.

- A fifth lesson is that reforms are unlikely to succeed unless the government is committed to seeing them through.

- The sixth lesson the IMF has swept aside is that bailing out countries that do not fully control their currencies carries additional risks.

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The IMF´s participation in the eurozone crisis has now given powerful emerging economies another reason to be disenchanted. After the US stymied their demands for a greater say within the Fund, they now find that the organization has been doing Europe´s bidding. It will be difficult for the IMF to regain the trust of these increasingly prominent members. Unless the US and the EU relinquish their grip, the Fund´s latest bid for relevance may well turn out to be its last.

[Oscar]

Tsipras calls Greek election for Sept. 20

[ http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/tsipras ... 97780?cid= ]

Syriza has seen divisions in the party and recent votes have relied on opposition support

CBC News Posted: Aug 20, 2015 12:37 PM ET| Last Updated: Aug 20, 2015 2:36 PM ET

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has called an election for Sept. 20, saying he'll seek to remain in the job.

Tsipras announced the move to the nation a little after at 8 p.m. local time, or 1 p.m. ET in North America.

Tsipras submitted his resignation to President Prokopis Pavlopoulos and asked for the earliest possible election date. Officials with the Greek government say the aim is to hold the vote on Sept 20.

There had been speculation that Tsipras would call an election and then not run, but he said he is standing for re-election and seeks a mandate to continue as leader.

"I will seek the vote of Greek people to rule and continue our government programs," he said. "The political mandate of the January 25 elections has exhausted its limits and now the Greek people have to have their say," the Greek leader said, referring to his election win earlier this year.

Tsipras has held together his coalition of power in recent months as he stickhandles his way through negotiations for a new bailout, but in recent weeks, he has been able to count on less and less support from his own party, Syriza.

The government has long been rumoured to be considering holding a new election, but had said its priority was getting the first bailout instalment and making a debt repayment to the European Central Bank, both of which it did Thursday.

MORE:

[ http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/tsipras ... 97780?cid= ]


= = = = = = =


LISTEN: Adonis Georgiadis, MP for the New Democracy party, speaks on Greek snap election 6:38 min.

[ http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/tsipras ... 97780?cid= ]