Posted on 06/05/2015 3:56:20 PM PDT by The_Reader_David
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The International Monetary Fund is in very serious trouble. Events have reached a point in Greece where the Fund's own credibility and long-term survival are at stake.
The Greeks are not withholding a €300m payment to the IMF because they have run out of money, though they soon will do.
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They knew exactly what they were doing. The IMF’s Christine Lagarde was caught badly off guard. Staff officials in Washington were stunned. ....
The IMF’s Original Sin in Greece was to allow the urbane Parisian Dominique Strauss-Kahn to hijack the institution to prop up Europe’s monetary union and the European banking system when the crisis erupted in 2010.
The Fund’s mission is to save countries, not currencies or banks, and it certainly should not be doing dirty work for a rich currency union that is fully capable of sorting out its own affairs, but refuses to do so for political reasons.
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Yet leaked minutes from the IMF board meetings showed that all the emerging market members (and Switzerland) opposed the terms of the first loan package for Greece. They protested that it was intended to save the euro, not Greece.
It loaded yet more debt onto the crushed shoulders of an already bankrupt country, and further complicated the picture by allowing one large French bank and one German bank – no names please – to offload much of their €25bn combined exposure onto EMU taxpayers.
“Debt restructuring should have been on the table,” said Brazil's member. The loans “may be seen not as a rescue of Greece, which will have to undergo a wrenching adjustment, but as a bailout of Greece’s private debt holders, mainly European financial institutions”.
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(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Culpable as prior Greek governments are for their profligacy, the real villains in the Greek financial crisis this time are the folks who "fixed" the last Greek financial crisis on behalf of the European banksters.
It's a long read, but worthwhile.
I stopped reading Ambrose Evans-Pritchard years ago because is usually wrong. That doesn’t mean he’s wrong here, but he has a long history of being far off the mark.
Anytime I read about the Greece IMF situation I have visions of Lucy holding the ball and telling Charlie Brown to kick it, I am just not sure which party belongs to which character.
Bank welfare, got to love it!
Think they will come up with EBT cards for bankers and central banks?
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