The Lethal Deferral of Greek Debt Restructuring Written by Yanis Varoufakis ATHENS – The point of restructuring debt is to reduce the volume of new loans needed to salvage an insolvent entity. Creditors offer debt relief to get more value back and to extend as little new finance to the insolvent entity as possible. Remarkably, […]Yanis Varoufakis: “Unsustainable debt turns the creditor into Leviathan; Life under it is becoming nasty, brutish and short”
August 10, 2015 by Leave a Comment
The Lethal Deferral of Greek Debt Restructuring Written by Yanis Varoufakis ATHENS – The point of restructuring debt is to reduce the volume of new loans needed to salvage an insolvent entity. Creditors offer debt relief to get more value back and to extend as little new finance to the insolvent entity as possible. Remarkably, […]GREXIT final wrap-up: nobody believed Aesop’s boy who cried wolf so many times
June 20, 2015 by Leave a Comment
“The boy who cried wolf” is a famous Aesop’s fable having a boy Shepherd calling the village for help too often just for the fun of his. Of course after many false alarms when the village came to help the boy for nothing, soon they just ignored his next calls. We also all remember the bitter […]“If they think they can slave an entire nation, then they will just have the opposite results!”, Alexis Tsipras cries out from the Greek parliament
June 6, 2015 by Leave a Comment
The world is moving forward full speed ahead and the Greeks seem to be the heavy anchor that has not been effectively lifted. This time though it is nothing about the glass of the negotiations being half empty or half full, as the eurosceptics or the pro-Europeans would normally say. The glass broke last Wednesday […]Athens searches frantically for a new compromise between politics and economic reality
February 19, 2015 by Leave a Comment
This week the new Greek government started faltering on all accounts. The young Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, who got elected on 25 January under a populist banner to change everything in this crisis stricken nation, proposed Prokopis Pavlopoulos for President of the Republic, an old fox representing the corrupt and incompetent political system which governed […]EU Summit’s major takeaway: a handkerchief cannot save Greece from austerity
February 13, 2015 by Leave a Comment
After Wednesday’s Eurogroup where Greece’s Minister of Finance, Yanis Varoufakis, “agreed to disagree” with his European counterparts, Grexit enthusiasts had a reason to celebrate in the evening. However, they did not count for the modern Hercules, Alexis Tsipras, who came tieless to his first EU Summit yesterday in Brussels but with plenty and trendy new […]Eurozone: The crisis hit countries are again subsidizing the German and French banks
May 19, 2014 by Leave a Comment
The European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the infamous ‘Troika’, officially declared that Portugal has successfully completed the assistance program and now as a financially self-sustainable country she can address herself to the markets, whatever this last term means. Towards the end of April, Portugal sold a €750 million bond […]EFSF/ESM boss tells half truths about Troika’s doings
January 16, 2014 by Leave a Comment
Yesterday, Klaus Regling, the Chief Executive Officer of the European Financial Stability Facility and Managing Director of the European Stability Mechanism, went to the European Parliament and was questioned by MEPs, about the anti-crisis role and operations of the ‘Troika’, a construction made up by the EU Commission, the European Central Bank and the International […]The European Parliament x-rays the troika’s doings
January 14, 2014 by Leave a Comment
The European Parliament launched an investigation on the functioning and the legitimisation of the troika, made up by the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The three institutions between them undertook to bail out, guide and audit the economies of four Eurozone member states which reached a point of no […]The fatal consequences of troika’s blind austerity policy
January 10, 2014 by Leave a Comment
When the ‘troika’, made up by the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund was atypically formed first in spring of 2010 to bail out and audit Greece, its widely advertised purpose was to inflict an internal devaluation on this country. Later on the troika undertook to perform the same task […]Two EU Commissioners fire at will against the US
July 18, 2013 by Leave a Comment
From both sides of the Atlantic Ocean two European Commissioners, Michel Barnier from Washington and Vivian Reding from Heidelberg, while addressing yesterday quite different audiences, sent out converging messages criticising the US. They both expressed novel views vis-à-vis EU–US relations in general, which can be interpreted as hardening of Commission’s position in reference to on-going […]E-Government can be a remedy for the crisis
March 24, 2013 by 2 Comments
Since the dawn of the 21st century it has been clear that Information Communication Technology (ICT) would be a significant driver of modern society. Let’s not go far. Think about your first cell phones at the beginning of the millennium that were as big as a ping-pong racket, indeed very inconvenient, while mobile communication was […]Eurozone: Austerity brings new political tremors
January 3, 2013 by Leave a Comment
The new political stalemate in Portugal – after the President of the country send the 2013 government budget to the high court questioning its constitutionality – casts again doubts over Eurozone’s ability to manage the austerity policies needed, to secure a viable politico-economic path. In more detail, yesterday Wednesday 2 January, the Portuguese President Anibal Cavaco Silva, […]Lagarde’s metamorphoses, not a laughing matter
November 16, 2012 by 2 Comments
International politico-economic relations is a tricky field, with the major players constantly changing stance, according to their short term interests, putting aside whatever honourable principles are left in their decision making procedures. And all that being discussed and decided upon, by a handful of people behind closed doors. If those people were not playing with […]Eurozone again whipped by Greek winds
June 20, 2012 by Leave a Comment
The details of Private Sector Participation (PSI) in the haircut of the Greek debt is presently the critical issue, on which will be judged not only the prospects of Athens regaining sometime in 2015 the possibility of self-financing its debts, but the outcome of negotiations over the PSI will also define the overall abilities of […]
