What a triumph! What a Victory! Greece sold 5 year T-Bills on the market in an offer that was greatly over subscribed and at an interest rate slightly lower than feared. What a success! What proof that the country has exited not the Euro but the crisis! The economy has not only “stabilised” (whatever that is supposed to mean) but is about to start growing stupendously!
And, in the far right wing mode of the current Greek government, everybody is being ordered to rejoice or else!!! Very reminiscent of what happened in North Korea at the death of their leader. People were ordered to publicly demonstrate their emotions or else!!! That is after all the extreme right wing Samaras (and Venizelos of course) style. Rejoice you scum of the earth or be damned!
And okay, these corrupt, treacherous guys have only one object. How to cling onto power and milk this dying cow till it dies! But what about Frau Merkel? The Commission? The Markets? Hmmm… Here it comes. As to the first two they are only playing politics too. Having insisted on imposing a brutally catastrophic policy of austerity with No provisions for growth, and having thrown the EZ into a tail spin bordering on deflation, they now need to beat their drum and provide proof that their idiocy actually worked!
Look! The Frau proudly claims. The Markets are falling over themselves to buy Junk… ehem I mean Greek (tautology) bonds!!! We did it! We succeeded! Oh, and by the way German elector, we won’t be “giving” them any more money (as if they ever did “give” anything at all) but they will now be borrowing from The Markets, with the same lethal conditions set by us.
Of course there are those who know very well that this is all a nonsense, that the Greek economy is NOT set to grow but to get worse since nothing at all is being contemplated to deal with the real problems of the real economy. Piling more expensive debt on an already greatly overindebted economy while continuing stringent austerity is hardly likely to help in any way at all.
So these guys have the pat answer to impending doom. Oh well, the Greek government isn’t implementing the reforms it should! It hasn’t arranged to shut all small pharmacies! It hasn’t imposed the shelf ruling for milk! It hasn’t agreed to adulterate olive oil with seed oil (!!! yes, one of the “reforms”) and so on. That, they are preparing to say is the root cause of Greece’s failure to recover after all we did for her!!!!
Meanwhile back at the ranch, as The Guardian reports today:
Lagarde’s warnings against complacency echoed an IMF report earlier in the week that chastised Brussels for failing to put in place a financial lifeboat capable of rescuing more than a few small banks. The financial stability report also highlighted concerns at the rise of risky investments in the US and difficulties faced by emerging economies destabilised by huge outflows of funds. Low inflation in the eurozone was also a concern, especially as it could herald a downward spiral of low growth and declining real wages.
The global economy is going down the tubes because like the Bourbons before them those running the show “have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing:”. Which is one reason for the panegyrics over Greece’s “return” to The Markets. All that matters is that “investors” are going to make a pretty buck out of high interest on junk bonds while the actual Greek economy sinks further and further into the mire.
No one gives a brass farthing (remember those?) for how the real economy actually functions and what to do to help improve it. So a lot of hot air, silly shows (like the Greek bond issue), deaf ears, inability or lack of will to tackle the real problems which are just being continually ignored and swept under the carpet. Till Nemesis arrived and takes its toll after all this human Hubris.
We are no longer on board the Titanic looking at the ice berg, but atop Mount Vesuvius a little before the eruption. Welcome to Pompeii everybody!
P.S. Just to highlight the level of the Greek government’s intelligence, the spokesman kept referring to T-Bills as T-Bones… All the same to him.