IMF Warns Eurogroup Loan Measures Not Enough for Greek Debt• Greek debt is highly unsustainable; measures not specific
• Debt will jump as high as 275 percent of GDP by 2060
Greece’s public debt and financing needs will prove “explosive” in decades to come unless Europe overhauls its bailout program to ease the load, the International Monetary Fund says in a draft report as the country seeks a fresh loan payout.
In the IMF’s baseline scenario, Greece’s government debt will reach 275 percent of its gross domestic product by 2060, when its financing needs will represent 62 percent of GDP, the report obtained by Bloomberg says. The government estimates public debt around 180 percent of GDP at present.
The European Union’s view of the evolution of Greek debt is “more benign” and based on “significantly more optimistic assumptions,” the IMF notes. The document also says some Greek debt proposals by euro-area finance ministers “are not specific enough to enable a full assessment” of how they would affect sustainability.
Greece and its creditors are locked in negotiations on how the nation can close its fiscal gap, in line with the requirements of the 86 billion-euro ($92 billion) aid program agreed with the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF. Failure to strike a deal would hold up the release of the next portion of bailout funding.
Europe RespondsThe IMF board is set to discuss Greece’s ability to service its debt on Feb. 6.
The fund has resisted pressure from countries including Germany and the Netherlands to contribute to the bailout program, seeing it as doomed unless Greece takes further steps to rein in spending or euro-area governments ease the terms of the loans.
Europe’s aid program for Greece is credible and backed by contingency measures to handle unforeseen events, a spokesman for the European Stability Mechanism, an EU agency that provides bailout loans to Greece, said in e-mailed statement Sunday.
“We see no reason for an alarmistic assessment of Greece’s debt situation,” the spokesman said, adding that Europe has made clear commitments to support the country with additional debt relief after the program. The statement makes no direct reference to the IMF draft.
IMF ProposalsAs in the past, the IMF is proposing that Europe extend grace periods and maturity dates on the loans. The document also calls for further deferral of interest payments and to lock in interest rates.
For its part, Greece needs to tackle tax evasion and broaden its tax base, the IMF says, repeating recommendations in previous reports. It also needs to re-balance spending away from pensions and deal with bad loans that are weighing on banks.
Greek debt is “highly unsustainable” and “even with the full implementation of policies agreed under the European Stability Mechanism program, public debt and financing needs will become explosive in the long run,” the document says. A “substantial restructuring” of European loans to Greece is required to restore debt sustainability, it says.
The IMF agrees with Greece’s euro-area creditors on one point. Both want Greece to introduce a law triggering austerity measures if the country fails to maintain a budget surplus before interest payments of 3.5 percent of GDP. Greek Finance Minister Euclid Tsakalotos last week rejected that demand as “unacceptable.”
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De 3e bailout is bijna verdampt door de schuldenberg.
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Grexit? Greece again on the brink as debt crisis threatens break with EUCountry faces critical few weeks as it struggles to meet bailout conditions and pressures rise in Germany and US
In the week of Groundhog Day it seemed entirely appropriate: Greek farmers, many on tractors, have once again been blockading roads and border posts amid mounting signs that the country long at the centre of Europe’s debt woes is – once again – teetering towards crisis.
Protesting farmers have been a regular feature of the social unrest that has sporadically gripped Greece. It is now more than seven years since the Greek financial crisis erupted and the debt drama has often had a deja vu quality about it.
Eclipsed last year by the UK’s vote to exit the EU, and Donald Trump’s equally unlikely US electoral victory, the nation’s epic struggle to keep bankruptcy at bay has been out of the spotlight.
Greece has three weeks to deal with 'potentially disastrous' debtBailout negotiations between Athens and its creditors have stalled. The possibility of Grexit, or euro exit, has re-emerged and bond yields have soared.
The yield on two-year Greek government bonds has risen from 6% to 10% in less than two weeks as spooked investors have dumped their holdings. And the shrill rhetoric last seen at the height of the crisis in 2015 has returned.
Analysts sensing dangerous deadlock are sounding the alarm – an alarm that the embattled prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, was expected to raise in talks with the German chancellor and other European leaders in Malta on Friday.
“I am very worried we are heading towards a rupture with the EU,” said Pantelis Kapsis, a prominent political commentator. “There are lots of signs that at the back of their minds people in Syriza [the ruling leftist party] are entertaining various ideas of going it alone. What is sure is that we are entering a very difficult period which quite possibly could lead us to a point of no return.”
As always, time is of the essence. Shored up by a third EU-led bailout, Athens was told this week that further rescue funds would not be forthcoming until it concluded a compliance review of terms attached to the ¤86bn (£74bn) aid package. In July Greece faces debt repayments of ¤7.4bn, raising the spectre of default because state coffers by then will have run dry.
The impasse has turned into a standoff as creditors demand additional austerity once the current bailout expires. Without further reduction of pensions – already cut 12 times since the crisis began – and the tax-free threshold of personal incomes, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) argues, the debt-stricken country will never be able to achieve its agreed fiscal goal of a primary surplus of 3.5% of GDP from 2018.
In a fiery parliamentary debate late on Wednesday, Tsipras dug in, insisting his two-party coalition – in power with a wafer-thin majority of two – would not cave in to demands that his government has repeatedly called absurd. “The IMF’s demands go beyond any democratic and constitutional logic and value,” he railed.
Alexis Tsipras arriving in Valletta, Malta, for the EU summit.
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Alexis Tsipras arriving in Valletta, Malta, for the EU summit. Photograph: Leon Neal/PA
Completion of the review is essential to Greece, exiled from international capital markets, being included in the European Central Bank’s 9 March bond-buying programme, key to the country regaining market access. If the deadline is missed few believe Athens will be able to keep itself afloat without a fourth bailout once the latest loans end.
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And in a Europe preoccupied with other matters – and in fear of an anti-establishment ascendant far right – the prospect of that happening is slim. “What we are witnessing is a disaster for the real economy because everything is on hold,” said Costas Panagopoulos who heads the Alco polling institute. “Once again we are talking about economic catastrophe, once again we are talking about Grexit,” he told the Guardian. “The next few weeks are critical. If an agreement isn’t reached, if there is more uncertainty, we don’t know how Greeks will react.”
On Thursday, amid widespread rumours of his own resignation, the finance minister Euclid Tsakalotos attempted to deflect the spiralling tensions. In a written statement the Marxist economics professor said that while a third of the bailout review had been “totally completed” and a third “totally agreed”, the rest remained subject to “political negotiation” – raising little hope of the talks concluding any time soon.
But what happens next is dependent not only on what happens in Athens. To a great degree events in Europe and Washington will also play a role.
Ahead of Germany’s general election in September, Berlin’s finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble has also raised the stakes with growing criticism of Greece – a tactic that has proved popular with voters who might otherwise support Germany’s far-right AfD party. Earlier this week Bild, the mass-selling newspaper, stoked passions further by suggesting the German government was warming to the idea of Greece leaving the euro – a notion Schäuble has openly supported in the past.
“Grexit is not our agenda, it is the agenda of those who want the breakup of Europe,” said Sia Anagnostopoulou, a leading Syriza MP and former alternate European affairs minister. “It is what Mr Schäuble wants,” she added, echoing the commonly held view that Athens is hostage to Germany.
Complicating matters further is the direction the IMF will take now that President Trump is in power. In his former role as a billionaire businessman, Trump tweeted that the Greeks were “wasting time” in the eurozone.
Last week, the IMF delivered its gloomiest assessment yet of Greece’s debt burden, arguing that it was not only unsustainable but eventually likely to become “explosive”. The IMF’s board will formally discuss the issue on 6 February but has already hinted that without a commitment of debt relief from the EU it will be unable to contribute further loans.
Germany, the biggest contributor to the nearly ¤300bn of emergency funds assigned to Greece, insists further aid depends exclusively on IMF participation.Analysts are undecided whether the government is deliberately stalling in the hope of getting a better deal as repayment season approaches and fears of a disorderly default mount, or whether it is playing with fire.
Syriza, like every governing party before it, has been hollowed out by the eviscerating effects of having to apply policies that it came to power vowing to oppose. On Tuesday its parliamentary spokesman took Greeks by storm proposing that Grexit be discussed “without taboo” in the 300-member house.
The once unassailable popularity of Tsipras, meanwhile, has been pummelled by the implementation of some of the harshest measures to date and few believe he has the political capital to enforce another round of austerity.
“It is not a can but a bomb being kicked down the road,” said one western diplomat. “In a world where liberal values are under threat we could be looking at a very dangerous scenario where the cradle of democracy also collapses.”
Bereft of growth and battered by cuts and tax increases, Greeks have become poorer and ever more cognizant of their own insolvency in a state where sovereignty exists in little more than name.
One in three now live below the poverty line and unemployment hovers around 23%. The latest impasse has not only seen emigration levels rise and non-repayment of household and business loans soar but also nostalgia for the drachma grow.
That is what worries Panagopoulos, the pollster, most. What was once a minority view is changing fast, with the majority of Greeks in a recent Alco survey saying it was wrong to have joined the euro.
“We have become a society that has no hope, not even a slice or piece of hope for the future,” he sighed. “The only reason people want to stay in the euro is because they fear the consequences if we were to leave, but if things don’t get better that will change too.”