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Saturday, July 11, 2015

A 90% Chance of a Deal on Greece?

   So tweets Ambrose Pritchard and we've figured out that he is a very important insider. The shame is I should have been following him for the last 6 months-I'd know a lot about Syrzia then.

  "Here is his tweet:

  "Just spoke to senior Greek banker. Delighted. Sees 90% chance of deal. France + US saved hour. Still worried Schauble might throw spanner"

   https://twitter.com/AmbroseEP

  You would think that even Merkel would be embarrassed to be the spanner now but you should never underestimate the Germans.

  On the question of Grexit, as Prtichard wrote yesterday, Syrzia sort of had himself in an untenable position. You can criticize him for ignoring the referendum but you have to remember that there was a mandate not to take the deal but not a mandate to leave the euro.

 "Prime minister Alexis Tspiras sought to put the best face on a painful climbdown, recoiling from a traumatic fight that would have led to Greece's ejection from the euro as soon as Monday. He implicitly recognised that the strain of capital controls and economic collapse has been too much to bear."

 “We are confronted with crucial decisions. We got a mandate to bring a better deal than the ultimatum that the Eurogroup gave us, but we weren't given a mandate to take Greece out of the eurozone,” he said.

 "A top Greek banker close to the talks said there is now a "90pc chance" of clinching a deal, thanks both to intervention behind the scenes by a team from the French treasury and to aggressive diplomacy by Washington"

 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11732926/Crippled-Greece-yields-to-overwhelming-power-as-deal-looms.html

 There is truth in it though. If there were a Grexit the Greek people would have blamed him and in his call for a no vote last week he insisted that it was not a vote on the euro. If it had been then the vote probably would have been yes.

  As for Merkel, she too is struggling with her decision.

 "For the chancellor, a rescue risks widespread complaints from German taxpayers, who have already borne the brunt of two Greek bailouts. It could also provoke a large revolt in her conservative CDU/CSU bloc where MPs are fuming not only at the demands by Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras but also his seeming contempt for the country’s creditors.

  "But, given her stature, a Grexit would leave her carrying much of the international criticism for a manifest failure of EU solidarity."

  http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f0040a3a-26f5-11e5-9c4e-a775d2b173ca.html#ixzz3faZo9QUe

 But why save a few billion dollars in order to lose many billions as US Treasury Secretary has pointed out? A Grexit means default. As for the cost to the German taxpayer, well. some in Germany have suggested it's not such a large cost really:

 "They were slightly irritated by the pessimism I’d expressed earlier in the day. “Don’t you realize,” one of them said, “that the cost to us (Germany) of bailing out Greece is far less than it cost us to reintegrate East Germany after the wall came down in 1989?”

  "I almost choked on my croissant. Yes, I replied, I am aware of that. I lived and worked in Berlin as a journalist in the mid 1990s, when that very painful (economically speaking) process was taking place in Germany. But doesn’t that, I said politely, rather beg the question: Germany integrating their brethren, who’d been isolated and impoverished during the cold war, was a dream come true, whatever the cost. Germans, on the other hand paying to bail out Greece is, to average German, rather the opposite of a dream come true, is it not?"

  "He waved me off. No no, he said, it will be taken care of. The Germans, he said, understood how beneficial to them membership in the euro zone has been. Without it, the gentleman said, the value of the Deutschemark would be 50% or 75% higher than it is under the euro. “German industry would be wiped off the map.”

  http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2015/07/germany-and-greece-cowhos-parasite.html




  

  



  

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