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Wall Street and the Greek Financial Crisis
Hudson, Michael; Black, Bill
http://beta.counterpunch.org/2015/07/01/wall-street-and-the-greek-financial-crisis/Date Written: 2015-07-01 Publisher: CounterPunch Year Published: 2015 Resource Type: Article Cx Number: CX17642 Michael Hudson and Bill Black zero in on some of the key elements of the crisis. They point out that it is not really 'Greece', let alone the Greek people, who have contracted this debt and who have been bailed out until now. Abstract: - Excerpt: First of all, for treating the debt claims of the IMF and the European Central Bank as odious debts. This means they shouldn’t have been put in place to begin with, and the debts, the money that was lent to Greece went right through Greece to pay the French banks and the German banks, and to enable the American Wall Street banks to make a killing. The Wall Street banks made whole reputations of buying bonds at 30 cents on the dollar and suddenly they went up to 100 cents on the dollar. The market basically said Greece couldn’t pay in 2010. The market priced its bonds very low. Right now Greece bonds are yielding 33 percent. So the market says Greece can’t pay. And so when Europe is saying, we want to impose a market economy, everything the European Central Bank and IMF is doing is against the market. They’re not recognizing what any real market analyst realizes, that the debts can’t be paid. We want to create a real market economy by getting rid by getting rid of the exploitation, by writing off the bad debts, by reforming the tax system. A few years ago the IMF’s Christine Lagarde provided a list to Greece of Greek tax evaders that had 50 billion Euros in Switzerland. This 50 billion Euros was enough to pay all of Greece’s debts. And the technocratic leader that the financial interests installed, Lucas Papademos, the very man who falsified all of the Greek payments and debt statements in 2001, didn’t do anything at all with the list. He refused to move against the oligarchs. So what you have is, is really a combination of treason and criminal behavior. Now that there is a crisis in Greece this enables Syriza to get the support of the people to throw the bad guys in jail. I’d like to say to throw the lawbreakers in jail, but they don’t have any laws against that kind of crime taking place. So they have to draw up a whole new set of laws to make Greece a fair economy, instead of the unfair system that the IMF and the European Central Banks have turned it into. Subject Headings |