I have just read an excellent interview of Christine Lagarde by Decca Aitkenhead in the Guardian. She is not very nice about Greece in that she appears to have no sympathy for Greek children going hungry because it’s all the fault of their parents who don’t pay their taxes, so it serves them right.
Unfortunately, she doesn’t even have the imagination to realise that the parents of the children going hungry are not the ones who don’t pay taxes. No, those people are the ones she rubs shoulders with in Washington and New York when sharing a giggle over the purchase of their new Hermes scarves. In fact the parents of the children going hungry are the ones who are paying taxes, being bled dry by the inhuman austerity she favours so much.
Then she says she has much more sympathy for the children in a village in the Niger, than for Greek children suffering. Now, though it does seem like an odd way of putting it, she does have a point. The point being that Europe is rich enough and has plentiful resources and could well resolve this crisis on its own without any outside help. Only she doesn’t put it that way. It’s not Europe that comes in for criticism, but the Greeks as such again.
Anyway, never mind. This is her point of view and given that the Greeks are totally unmanageable as she sees it, perhaps we can understand her impatience. However, when you finish reading the whole interview you feel terrified. This wonderful, charming, composed French lady at the helm of the IMF is just as clueless as all the rest of them in the EU.
She has no idea what she is doing or even where she hopes to get. Her idea of democracy is, yes of course it is a “good thing”, but governments must do what she wants whoever is voted in. Look, she says with pride, we got rid of Berlusconi and now have Monti who is doing a very good job. (Well, perhaps, he has just plunged Italy into recession.) And in Greece the technocrat Lucas Papdemos took over. (Who did nothing at all while PM other than negotiate, or rather be dictated, a loan agreement that is a death warrant for the Greek Economy.)
Nevertheless, Mme Lagarde is very pleased with these two gentlemen and to crown it all she says, well look there were elections in Spain and the new government continued the economic policy imposed, despite his pre election rhetoric. Does it matter that Bankia has crashed, spreads have soared and Spain is teetering on the brink? Apparently not. All that matters is that Rajoy toed her line.
And her closing remark is devastating. When asked when she thinks the crisis that began in 2008 will end, she fudges and puts on the charm, ending up with, 2000 something. “I know the first two digits but not the last two”.
We may well ask with her level of competence and that of all the other “deciders” involved, how can she be so sure about those first two digits? A bit cocky of her isn’t it? Anyway, as she admires herself in the mirror while fixing her latest Hermes silk scarf, she can shrug her shoulders, confident that anyway, everybody else will be eating plenty of cake as she carries on in her cushy little job, doing nothing much other than destroying economies, for many more years to come, as she expects.
When we all start singing “La Bandiera Rossa”, I dare say she will find us horribly out of rune and shudder at that.
