Germans Furious After Varoufakis/Tsipras Admit "Greece Will Never Repay Its Debts" | Zero Hedge

The Greco-Germanic war of words continues... Having pissed off The Greeks with his "Troika" remarks, Germany's Schaeuble went on today to more ad hominum attacks by reportedly calling the Greek FinMin "foolishly naive." The Greek ambassador has 'officially' complained to "friend and ally" Germany about the personal insult. But The Greeks had the last laugh, as first Varoufakis and then Tsipras explained respectively that "Greece would never pay back its debts," and "Greece cannot pretend its debt burden is sustainable." The German response, via tabloid Bild, "there must be an end to this madness. Europe must not be made to look stupid."

As Bloomberg reports, Germany and Greece confirmed Thursday that the Greek ambassador in Berlin made an official protest late Tuesday to the German Foreign Ministry over comments made by Schaeuble.

Schaeuble and his Greek counterpart Yanis Varoufakis have traded barbs in recent weeks, with Schaeuble on Tuesday suggesting that Varoufakis needed to look more closely at an agreement that Greece signed in February: “He just has to read it. I’m willing to lend him my copy if need be.”

“It was a complaint after what he (Schaeuble) said about Mr. Varoufakis. As a minister of a country that is our friend and our ally, he cannot personally insult a colleague.”

Koutras did not specify what the insult was, but Greek media had reported that Schaeuble had said that Varoufakis was “foolishly naive.”

Complete story at - Germans Furious After Varoufakis/Tsipras Admit "Greece Will Never Repay Its Debts" | Zero Hedge

Germans Furious After Varoufakis/Tsipras Admit "Greece Will Never Repay Its Debts" | Zero Hedge

The Greco-Germanic war of words continues... Having pissed off The Greeks with his "Troika" remarks, Germany's Schaeuble went on today to more ad hominum attacks by reportedly calling the Greek FinMin "foolishly naive." The Greek ambassador has 'officially' complained to "friend and ally" Germany about the personal insult. But The Greeks had the last laugh, as first Varoufakis and then Tsipras explained respectively that "Greece would never pay back its debts," and "Greece cannot pretend its debt burden is sustainable." The German response, via tabloid Bild, "there must be an end to this madness. Europe must not be made to look stupid."

As Bloomberg reports, Germany and Greece confirmed Thursday that the Greek ambassador in Berlin made an official protest late Tuesday to the German Foreign Ministry over comments made by Schaeuble.

Schaeuble and his Greek counterpart Yanis Varoufakis have traded barbs in recent weeks, with Schaeuble on Tuesday suggesting that Varoufakis needed to look more closely at an agreement that Greece signed in February: “He just has to read it. I’m willing to lend him my copy if need be.”

“It was a complaint after what he (Schaeuble) said about Mr. Varoufakis. As a minister of a country that is our friend and our ally, he cannot personally insult a colleague.”

Koutras did not specify what the insult was, but Greek media had reported that Schaeuble had said that Varoufakis was “foolishly naive.”

Complete story at - Germans Furious After Varoufakis/Tsipras Admit "Greece Will Never Repay Its Debts" | Zero Hedge

The ECB’s Noose Around Greece | Dissident Voice

Remember when the infamous Goldman Sachs delivered a thinly-veiled threat to the Greek Parliament in December, warning them to elect a pro-austerity prime minister or risk having central bank liquidity cut off to their banks? (See January 6th post here.) It seems the European Central Bank (headed by Mario Draghi, former managing director of Goldman Sachs International) has now made good on the threat.

The week after the leftwing Syriza candidate Alexis Tsipras was sworn in as prime minister, the ECB announced that it would no longer accept Greek government bonds and government-guaranteed debts as collateral for central bank loans to Greek banks. The banks were reduced to getting their central bank liquidity through “Emergency Liquidity Assistance” (ELA), which is at high interest rates and can also be terminated by the ECB at will.

In an interview reported in the German magazine Der Spiegel on March 6th, Alexis Tsipras said that the ECB was “holding a noose around Greece’s neck.” If the ECB continued its hardball tactics, he warned, “it will be back to the thriller we saw before February” (referring to the market turmoil accompanying negotiations before a four-month bailout extension was finally agreed to).

The noose around Greece’s neck is this: the ECB will not accept Greek bonds as collateral for the central bank liquidity all banks need, until the new Syriza government accepts the very stringent austerity program imposed by the troika (the EU Commission, ECB and IMF). That means selling off public assets (including ports, airports, electric and petroleum companies), slashing salaries and pensions, drastically increasing taxes and dismantling social services, while creating special funds to save the banking system.

These are the mafia-like extortion tactics by which entire economies are yoked into paying off debts to foreign banks – debts that must be paid with the labor, assets and patrimony of people who had nothing to do with incurring them.

Playing Chicken with the People’s Money

Greece is not the first to feel the noose tightening on its neck. As The Economist notes, in 2013 the ECB announced that it would cut off Emergency Lending Assistance to Cypriot banks within days, unless the government agreed to its bailout terms. Similar threats were used to get agreement from the Irish government in 2010.

Likewise, says The Economist, the “Greek banks’ growing dependence on ELA leaves the government at the ECB’s mercy as it tries to renegotiate the bailout.”

Complete story at - The ECB’s Noose Around Greece | Dissident Voice

How Goes the War? | James Howard Kunstler

Oh, you didn’t notice that World War Three is underway, actually has been for more than year?

Well, that’s because most of it has been taking place in the banking sector, which for most people is just an alternative universe of math. The catch, which many people either miss or don’t care about, is that the math doesn’t add up.

For instance, the runaway choo-choo train of linked European sovereign bond obligations with its overloaded caboose of interest rate swaps and other janky derivatives of mass destruction. That train left the station in Athens a few weeks ago bound for Frankfurt. Ever since, the German government and its cohorts in the EU, the ECB, and the IMF have been issuing reassurances that the choo choo train will not blow up when it reaches its destination.

Few people grok that Greece is an entity with an economy not much bigger than North Carolina’s, yet it is burdened with roughly $350 billion of old debt that will never be paid back. The only thing at issue is how it will not be paid back, that is, what mode of pretense will be employed to disguise the inability to pay back this debt. The mode du jour has been the crude one of lending Greece more money to pay back the interest on the old debt. A seven-year-old ought to be able to understand where that leads.

It’s kind of up to the Greeks this week to possibly opt out of that farcical deal. They have at least two other present options: return to being a sunwashed semi-medieval backwater of olive farmers, shepherds, and inn-keepers, or perhaps lease out some cozy corner of their vast Mediterranean coastline to the Russian navy for enough annual walking-around money to keep the lights on for the aforementioned farmers, shepherds, and inn-keepers. Of course, that would drive the United States and its NATO quislings batshit crazy.

Complete story at - How Goes the War? | James Howard Kunstler

Neoliberalism is our Frankenstein: Greece and Ukraine are the hot spots of a new war for supremacy

By Patrick L. Smith, Salon.com, Feb 12, 2015

We should be considering the Greece and Ukraine crises together. If only the news media would allow that.

“American backing for the Poroshenko government is decisive now, and there is no sign Washington intends to swerve from its insistence that Ukraine must be reshaped in the neoliberal mold regardless of the costs…

“A federation will spoil Washington’s neoliberal project in Ukraine. Easterners seem to see straight through Yatsenyuk’s hocus-pocus about the virtues of radical austerity. Again, what will Kerry mumble in Poroshenko’s ear in the next little while?”

Europe’s confrontation with Greece, the West’s with Russia as the Ukraine crisis runs nearly out of control: Why is it more useful by the week to think of these together?

They are both very large, moments of history. There is this. They both reach critical moments this week, as if in concert. The outcomes in each case will be consequential for all of us.

As noted with alarm last week, most Americans have by now surrendered to a blitz of propaganda wherein Russia and its leadership are cast as Siberian beasts, accepting as truth tales the National Enquirer would be embarrassed to run. In Europe, Greeks and Spaniards show us up, indeed, as a supine, spiritless people incapable of response or any resistance to the onslaught. There is this, too.

At writing, Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’s imaginative new finance minister, has just made his first formal effort to present European counterparts with new ideas to get foreign debts of €240 billion ($271 billion) off the books and the Greek economy back in motion. These ideas can work. Even creditor institutions acknowledge that Greece cannot pay its debts as they are now structured. But at a session in Brussels Wednesday, the European Union’s arms remained folded.

Complete story at - Neoliberalism is our Frankenstein: Greece and Ukraine are the hot spots of a new war for supremacy - New Cold War: Ukraine and Beyond

EU Set to Blame Russia for Ukraine Violence – but Greece May Intervene » American University in Moscow

Alexis Tsipras government could disrupt Thursday’s summit after it disagreed with a joint EU statement on Mariupol shelling

European governments are to push for tighter sanctions against the Kremlin and against Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine on Thursday.

But the new leftwing Greek government of Alexis Tsipras is likely to use the emergency meeting of foreign ministers in Brussels to pick its first fight with the rest of Europe.

The meeting was called at short notice by Federica Mogherini, the EU’s foreign policy coordinator, who has been forced to back down from a position calling for a relaxation of pressure on Moscow, as a result of last week’s shelling by separatists of the town of Mariupol that killed 30 civilians.

In an unusual statement on Tuesday released in the name of all 28 EU heads of government, Donald Tusk, the president of the European council, who chairs EU summits, held Moscow responsible for the shelling and told the foreign ministers to draw up additional sanctions options to be put to a summit of leaders in two weeks.

Britain, Poland and Lithuania are to push at Thursday’s meeting for a ratcheting up of the pressure on President Vladimir Putin, favouring stiffer and broader economic sanctions against Russia.

Decisions already drafted for Thursday’s meeting say the foreign ministers are to carry out "further preparatory work on further restrictive measures” before presenting the options to the summit on 12 February.

Complete story at - EU Set to Blame Russia for Ukraine Violence – but Greece May Intervene » American University in Moscow

Greece At The Crossroads: The Oligarchs Blew It | Zero Hedge

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,

Once one oligarchy falls, it will threaten to topple a long line of oligarch dominoes.

A great many narratives invoking Greece are being tossed around, but only one really encapsulates the unvarnished truth: the Oligarchs blew it. The oligarchs in both Greece and the European Union/ECB had the opportunity a few years ago to trade some of their outsized wealth and political power for stability and sustainable expansion.

Instead, they chose to not just cling to every shred of their outsized wealth and power but to actively increase it. Their greed and hubris has now put their entire system of parasitic wealth extraction at risk of collapse. Their political stranglehold on power has been weakened, and there's no going back: they blew it, and now it's too late. The debt-serfs have finally had enough.

If you enter Greece in the custom search box on this site, six pages of blog entries come up. I have addressed the situation in Greece many times; this summarizes my conclusion:

Greece, Please Do The Right Thing: Default Now (June 1, 2011)

Thankfully, many in Greece have reached the same conclusion, for the same reasons:

Greece's New FinMin Warns "We Are Going To Destroy The Greek Oligarchy System"

The basic problem is that Greece Is a Kleptocracy (June 28, 2011). Greece has shown the world how oligarchies can expand their wealth and power even as their populace slides deeper into poverty. A recent article, Misrule of the Few: How the Oligarchs Ruined Greece, lays out the key dynamics.

Writer Pavlos Eleftheriadis pulls no punches:

"Greece has failed to address (rising wealth/income inequality) because the country’s elites have a vested interest in keeping things as they are. Since the early 1990s, a handful of wealthy families -- an oligarchy in all but name -- has dominated Greek politics. These elites have preserved their positions through control of the media and through old-fashioned favoritism, sharing the spoils of power with the country’s politicians. Greek legislators, in turn, have held on to power by rewarding a small number of professional associations and public-sector unions that support the status quo. Even as European lenders have put the country’s finances under a microscope, this arrangement has held."

The vested interests have obscured the cold reality of rising inequality by focusing obsessively on "growth" as the fix-all to inequality.

Complete story at - Greece At The Crossroads: The Oligarchs Blew It | Zero Hedge

The 4th Media » Syriza Wins Greek Election: The End of the IMF-ruled ‘VICIOUS Cycle of AUSTERITY’

Here’s summary of a momentous election result for the future of Greece and Europe:

1. The anti-austerity far left party Syriza has won the Greek election by a decisive margin, but just short of an outright majority. With more than three-quarters of the results in Syriza is projected to win 149 seats in the 300 seat parliament.

2. Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras said his party’s victory marked an end to the “viscious cycle of austerity”. Referring to the neoliberal conditions set by the IMF, the European Commission and the European Central Bank, he said: “ The verdict of the Greek people renders the troika a thing of the past for our common European framework.”

3. Outgoing prime minister Antonis Samaras conceded defeated by acknowledging some mistakes. But he added: “We restored Greece’s international credibility”.

4. To Potami, the centre-left party could be the kingmakers in the new parliament, with a project 16 seats. Its leader Stavros Theodorakis has not ruled out a deal with Syriza. “It’s too early for such details,” he said.

5. The far-right Golden Dawn party is projected to come third in election, despite having more than half of its MPs in jail. Speaking from prison its leader Nikolaos Michaloliakos said the result was a “great victory” for the neo-fascist party.

6. Syriza victory has been greeted with alarm in Germany. The ruling CDU party insisting that Greece should stick to the austerity programme. But Belgium’s finance minister said there is room for negotiation with Syriza.

7. Leftwingers across Europe have hailed Syriza win. Spain’s anti-austerity party Podemos said Greece finally had a government rather than a German envoy. Britain’s Green Party said Syriza’s victory was an inspiration.

By Matthew Weaver, ICH

Complete story at - The 4th Media » Syriza Wins Greek Election: The End of the IMF-ruled ‘VICIOUS Cycle of AUSTERITY’

Russia News - News Analysis: How Syriza's Win Could Change EU Policy On Russia

BRUSSELS -- The election win by Greece's far-left Syriza party has focused attention on the impact that a potential "Grexit" could have on the eurozone economies.

But equally important is the effect this watershed victory could have on EU foreign policy -- especially in relation to Russia and its neighbors.

A look at how Syriza members in the European Parliament have voted on foreign-policy resolutions related to Russia and the Eastern Partnership countries in recent months gives an indication of where things could be headed.

Syriza members of the European Parliament voted against the Association Agreement with Ukraine in the autumn of 2014, which was supported by the majority of the Strasbourg chamber. They also abstained in the vote on Association Agreements for Georgia and Moldova, as well as in supporting a resolution condemning the closing of the Russian human rights NGO Memorial.

Other legislation Syriza deputies opposed included two recent resolutions drafted by the European Parliament that called for more sanctions on Moscow, condemning Russia's actions in Ukraine such as the annexation of Crimea and Moscow's support for separatists in the eastern part of the country.

Even a fairly low-key law on renewing EU-Ukraine cooperation on science and technology was opposed by the Greek party. In fact, the only Eastern Partnership-related item in the European Parliament that Syriza favored was granting EU trade preferences to Moldova.

Complete story at - Russia News - News Analysis: How Syriza's Win Could Change EU Policy On Russia

​Russian food ban takes huge bite out of Greek fruit growing industry — RT Business

Greek farmers say the Russian food embargo has already dealt a devastating blow to the country's agricultural economy, leaving at least 3.5 million kilograms of peaches rotting in refrigerated trucks after being turned back at the Russian border.

"There are around 3.5 million kilos of peaches currently rotting in trucks, and at the height of the summer another 3.5 million kilos have yet to be harvested," the Guardian quotes Apostolos Keranis, head of the Federation of Greek truckers. "We're talking about huge, huge damage."

Russia buys more than 60 percent of Greek peach exports, and almost 90 percent of strawberries, says Christos Yannakakis, the president of Greece's largest regional association of growers and cooperatives.

Approximately a tenth of European agricultural exports go to Russia, which is worth around €11 billion a year, according to European Commission data.

Complete story at - ​Russian food ban takes huge bite out of Greek fruit growing industry — RT Business

Neoliberalism has spawned a financial elite who hold governments to ransom | Deborah Orr | Comment is free | The Guardian

The International Monetary Fund has admitted that some of the decisions it made in the wake of the 2007-2008 financial crisis were wrong, and that the €130bn first bailout of Greece was "bungled". Well, yes. If it hadn't been a mistake, then it would have been the only bailout and everyone in Greece would have lived happily ever after.

Actually, the IMF hasn't quite admitted that it messed things up. It has said instead that it went along with its partners in "the Troika" – the European Commission and the European Central Bank – when it shouldn't have. The EC and the ECB, says the IMF, put the interests of the eurozone before the interests of Greece. The EC and the ECB, in turn, clutch their pearls and splutter with horror that they could be accused of something so petty as self-preservation.

The IMF also admits that it "underestimated" the effect austerity would have on Greece. Obviously, the rest of the Troika takes no issue with that. Even those who substitute "kick up the arse to all the lazy scroungers" whenever they encounter the word "austerity", have cottoned on to the fact that the word can only be intoned with facial features locked into a suitably tragic mask.

Yet, mealy-mouthed and hotly contested as this minor mea culpa is, it's still a sign that financial institutions may slowly be coming round to the idea that they are the problem. They know the crash was a debt-bubble that burst. What they don't seem to acknowledge is that the merry days of reckless lending are never going to return; even if they do, the same thing will happen again, but more quickly and more savagely. The thing is this: the crash was a write-off, not a repair job. The response from the start should have been a wholesale reevaluation of the way in which wealth is created and distributed around the globe, a "structural adjustment", as the philosopher John Gray has said all along.

The IMF exists to lend money to governments, so it's comic that it wags its finger at governments that run up debt. And, of course, its loans famously come with strings attached: adopt a free-market economy, or strengthen the one you have, kissing goodbye to the Big State. Yet, the irony is painful. Neoliberal ideology insists that states are too big and cumbersome, too centralised and faceless, to be efficient and responsive. I agree. The problem is that the ruthless sentimentalists of neoliberalism like to tell themselves – and anyone else who will listen – that removing the dead hand of state control frees the individual citizen to be entrepreneurial and productive. Instead, it places the financially powerful beyond any state, in an international elite that makes its own rules, and holds governments to ransom. That's what the financial crisis was all about. The ransom was paid, and as a result, governments have been obliged to limit their activities yet further – some setting about the task with greater relish than others. Now the task, supposedly, is to get the free market up and running again.

Complete story at - Neoliberalism has spawned a financial elite who hold governments to ransom | Deborah Orr | Comment is free | The Guardian