‘I swear,’ was my two-word answer to him.
A week later I was taking my oath of office as the country’s finance minister. During the months that followed, every time my resolve weakened I had only to think back to that moment. Lambros will never know of his influence during the bleakest hours of those 162 days.
2 Bailoutistan
By early 2010, some five years before I took office, the Greek state was bankrupt. A few months later the European Union, the International Monetary Fund and the Greek government organized the world’s greatest bankruptcy cover-up. How do you cover up a bankruptcy? By throwing good money after bad. And who financed this cover-up? Common people, ‘outsiders’ from all over the globe.
The rescue deal, as the cover-up was euphemistically known, was signed and sealed in early May 2010. The European Union and the IMF extended to the broke Greek government around €110 billion, the largest loan in history.1 Simultaneously a group of enforcers known as the troika – so called because they represent three institutions: the European Commission (EC), which is the EU’s executive body, the European Central Bank (ECB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) – was dispatched to Athens to impose measures guaranteed to reduce Greece’s national income and place most of the burden of the debt upon the weakest Greeks. A bright eight-year-old would have known that this couldn’t end well.
Forcing new loans upon the bankrupt on condition that they shrink their income is nothing short of cruel and unusual punishment. Greece was never bailed out. With their ‘rescue’ loan and their troika of bailiffs enthusiastically slashing incomes, the EU and IMF effectively condemned Greece to a modern version of the Dickensian debtors’ prison and then threw away the key.
Debtors’ prisons were ultimately abandoned because, despite their cruelty, they neither deterred the accumulation of new bad debts nor helped creditors get their money back. For capitalism to advance in the nineteenth century, the absurd notion that all debts are sacred had to be ditched and replaced with the notion of limited liability. After all, if all debts are guaranteed, why should lenders lend responsibly? And why should some debts carry a higher interest rate than other debts, reflecting the higher risk of going bad? Bankruptcy and debt write-downs became for capitalism what hell had always been for Christian dogma – unpleasant yet essential – but curiously bankruptcy-denial was revived in the twenty-first century to deal with the Greek state’s insolvency. Why? Did the EU and the IMF not realize what they were doing?
They knew exactly what they were doing. Despite their meticulous propaganda, in which they insisted that they were trying to save Greece, to grant the Greek people a second chance, to help reform Greece’s chronically crooked state and so on, the world’s most powerful institutions and governments were under no illusions. They appreciated that you could squeeze blood out of a stone more easily than make a bankrupt entity repay its loans by lending it more money, especially if you shrink its income as part of the deal. They could see that the troika, even if it managed to confiscate the fallen state’s silverware, would fail to recoup the money used to refinance Greece’s public debt. They knew that the celebrated ‘rescue’ or ‘bailout’ package was nothing more than a one-way ticket to debtors’ prison.
How do I know that they knew? Because they told me.
Prisoners of their own device
As finance minister five years later, I heard it straight from the horse’s mouth. From top IMF officials, from Germany’s finance minister, from leading figures in the ECB and the European Commission – they all admitted, each in their own way, that it was true: they had dealt Greece an impossible hand. But having done so, they could see no way back.
Less than a month after my election, on 11 February 2015, in one of those spirit-numbing, windowless, neon-lit meeting rooms that litter the EU’s Brussels buildings, I found myself sitting opposite Christine Lagarde, the IMF’s managing director, France’s ex-finance minister and a former Washington-based high-flying lawyer. She had waltzed into the building earlier that day in a glamorous leather jacket, making me look drab and conventionally attired. This being our first encounter, we chatted amicably in the corridor before moving into the meeting room for the serious discussion.
Behind closed doors, with a couple of aides on each side, the conversation turned serious but remained just as friendly. She afforded me the opportunity to present my basic analysis of the causes and nature of the Greek situation as well as my proposals for dealing with it, and nodded in agreement for much of the time. We seemed to share a common language and were both keen to establish a good rapport. At the meeting’s end, walking towards the door, we got a chance for a short, relaxed but telling tête-à-tête. Taking her cue from the points I had made, Christine seconded my appeals for debt relief and lower tax rates as prerequisites for a Greek recovery. Then she addressed me with calm and gentle honesty: You are of course right, Yanis. These targets that they insist on can’t work. But, you must understand that we have put too much into this programme. We cannot go back on it. Your credibility depends on accepting and working within this programme.2
So, there I had it. The head of the IMF was telling the finance minister of a bankrupt government that the policies imposed upon his country couldn’t work. Not that it would be hard to make them work. Not that the probability of them working was low. No, she was acknowledging that, come hell or high water, they couldn’t work.
With every meeting, especially with the troika’s smarter and less insecure officials, the impression grew on me that this was not a simple tale of us versus them, good versus bad. Rather, an authentic drama was afoot reminiscent of a play by Aeschylus or Shakespeare in which powerful schemers end up caught in a trap of their own making. In the real-life drama I was witnessing, Summers’s sacred rule of insiders kicked in the moment they recognized their powerlessness. The hatches were battened down, official denial prevailed, and the consequences of the tragic impasse they’d created were left to unfold on autopilot, imprisoning them yet further in a situation they detested for weakening their hold over events.
Because they – the heads of the IMF, of the EU, of the German and French governments – had invested inordinate political capital in a programme that deepened Greece’s bankruptcy, spread untold misery and led our young to emigrate in droves, there was no alternative: the people of Greece would simply have to continue to suffer. As for me, the political upstart, my credibility depended on accepting these policies, which insiders knew would fail, and helping to sell them to the outsiders who had elected me on the precise basis that I would break with those same failed policies.
It’s hard to explain, but not once did I feel animosity towards Christine Lagarde. I found her intelligent, cordial, respectful. My view of humanity would not be thrown into turmoil were it to be shown that she actually had a strong preference for a humane Greek deal. But that is not relevant. As a leading insider, her top priority was the preservation of the insiders’ political capital and the minimization of any challenge to their collective authority.
Yet credibility, like spending, comes with trade-offs. Every purchase means an alternative opportunity lost. Boosting my standing with Christine and the other figures of power meant sacrificing my credibility with Lambros, the homeless interpreter who had sworn me to the cause of those people who, unlike him, had not yet been drowned in the torrent of bankruptcy ravaging our land. This trade-off never came close to becoming a personal dilemma. And the powers that be realized this early on, making my removal from the scene essential.
A little more than a year later, in the run-up to the UK referendum on 23 June 2016, I was travelling across Britain giving speeches in support of a radical remain platform – the argument that the UK ought to stay within the EU to oppose this EU, to save it from collapse and to reform it. It was a tough sell. Convincing Britain’s outsiders to vote remain was proving an uphill struggle, especially in England’s north, because even my own supporters in Britain, women and men closer in spirit and position to Lambros than to Christine, were telling me they felt compelled to deliver a drubbing to the global establishment. One evening I heard on the BBC that Christine Lagarde had joined the heads of the world’s other top financial institutions (the World Bank, the OECD, the ECB, the Bank of England and so on) to warn Britain’s outsiders against the lure of Brexit. I immediately texted Danae from Leeds, where I was speaking that night, ‘With such allies, who needs Brexiteers?’
Brexit won because the insiders went beyond the pale. After decades of treating people like me as credible in proportion to our readiness to betray the outsiders who had voted for us, they still confused outsiders with people who gave a damn about their counsel. Up and down America, in Britain, in France and in Germany – everywhere – the insiders are feeling their authority slip away. Prisoners of their own device, slaves to the Summers dilemma, they are condemned, like Macbeth, to add error upon error until they realize that their crown no longer symbolizes the power they have but the power that has slipped away. In the few months I spent dealing with them, I caught glimpses of that tragic realization.
It was the (French and German) banks, stupid!
Friends and journalists often ask me to describe the worst aspect of my negotiations with Greece’s creditors. Not being able to shout from the rooftops what the high and mighty were telling me in private was certainly frustrating, but worse was dealing with creditors who did not really want their money back. Negotiating with them, trying to reason with them, was like negotiating a peace treaty with generals hell-bent on continuing a war safe in the knowledge that they, their sons and their daughters are out of harm’s way.
What was the nature of that war? Why did Greece’s creditors behave as if they did not want their money back? What led them to devise the trap in which they now found themselves? The riddle can be answered in seconds if one takes a look at the state of France’s and Germany’s banks after 2008.
Greece’s endemic underdevelopment, mismanagement and corruption explain its permanent economic weakness. But its recent insolvency is due to the fundamental design faults of the EU and its monetary union, the euro. The EU began as a cartel of big business limiting competition between central European heavy industries and securing export markets for them in peripheral countries such as Italy and, later, Greece. The deficits of countries like Greece were the reflection of the surpluses of countries like Germany. While the drachma devalued, these deficits were kept in check. But when it was replaced by the euro, loans from German and French banks propelled Greek deficits into the stratosphere.
The Credit Crunch of 2008 that followed Wall Street’s collapse bankrupted Europe’s bankers who ceased all lending by 2009. Unable to roll over its debts, Greece fell into its insolvency hole later that year. Suddenly three French banks faced losses from peripheral debt at least twice the size of the French economy. Numbers provided by the Bank of International Settlements reveal a truly scary picture: for every thirty euros they were exposed to, they had access to only one. This meant that if only 3 per cent of that exposure went bad – that is, if €106 billion of the loans they had given to the periphery’s governments, households and firms could not be repaid – then France’s top three banks would need a French government bailout.
The same three French banks’ loans to the Italian, Spanish and Portuguese governments alone came to 34 per cent of France’s total economy – €627 billion to be exact. For good measure, these banks had in previous years also lent up to €102 billion to the Greek state. If the Greek government could not meet its repayments, money men around the globe would get spooked and stop lending to the Portuguese, possibly to the Italian and Spanish states as well, fearing that they would be the next to go into arrears. Unable to refinance their combined debt of nearly €1.76 trillion at affordable interest rates, the Italian, Spanish and Portuguese governments would be hard pressed to service their loans to France’s top three banks, leaving a black hole in their books. Overnight, France’s main banks would be facing a loss of 19 per cent of their ‘assets’ when a mere 3 per cent loss would make them insolvent.
To plug that gap the French government would need a cool €562 billion overnight. But unlike the United States federal government, which can shift such losses to its central bank (the Fed), France had dismantled its central bank in 2000 when it joined the common currency and had to rely instead on the kindness of Europe’s shared central bank, the European Central Bank. Alas, the ECB was created with an express prohibition: no shifting of Graeco-Latin bad debts, private or public, onto the ECB’s books. Full stop. That had been Germany’s condition for sharing its cherished Deutschmark with Europe’s riff-raff, renaming it the euro.
It’s not hard to imagine the panic enveloping President Sarkozy of France and his finance minister, Christine Lagarde, as they realized that they might have to conjure up €562 billion from thin air. And it’s not difficult to picture the angst of one of Lagarde’s predecessors in France’s finance ministry, the notorious Dominic Strauss-Kahn, who was then managing director of the IMF and intent on using that position to launch his campaign for France’s presidency in two years’ time. France’s top officials knew that Greece’s bankruptcy would force the French state to borrow six times its total annual tax revenues just to hand it over to three idiotic banks.
It was simply impossible. Had the markets caught a whiff that this was on the cards, interest rates on France’s own public debt would have been propelled into the stratosphere, and in seconds €1.29 trillion of French government debt would have gone bad. In a country which had given up its capacity to print banknotes – the only remaining means of generating money from nothing – that would mean destitution, which in turn would bring down the whole of the European Union, its common currency, everything.
In Germany, meanwhile, the chancellor’s predicament was no less taxing. In 2008, as banks in Wall Street and the City of London crumbled, Angela Merkel was still fostering her image as the tight-fisted, financially prudent Iron Chancellor. Pointing a moralizing finger at the Anglosphere’s profligate bankers, she made headlines in a speech she gave in Stuttgart when she suggested that America’s bankers should have consulted a Swabian housewife, who would have taught them a thing or two about managing their finances. Imagine her horror when, shortly afterwards, she received a barrage of anxious phone calls from her finance ministry, her central bank, her own economic advisers, all of them conveying an unfathomable message: Chancellor, our banks are bust too! To keep the ATMs going, we need an injection of €406 billion of those Swabian housewives’ money – by yesterday!
It was the definition of political poison. How could she appear in front of those same members of parliament whom she had for years lectured on the virtues of penny-pinching when it came to hospitals, schools, infrastructure, social security, the environment, to implore them to write such a colossal cheque to bankers who until seconds before had been swimming in rivers of cash? Necessity being the mother of enforced humbleness, Chancellor Merkel took a deep breath, entered the splendid Norman Foster-designed federal parliament in Berlin known as the Bundestag, conveyed to her dumbfounded parliamentarians the bad news and left with the requested cheque. At least it’s done, she must have thought. Except that it wasn’t. A few months later another barrage of phone calls demanded a similar number of billions for the same banks.
Why did Deutsche Bank, Finanzbank and the other Frankfurt-based towers of financial incompetence need more? Because the €406 billion cheque they had received from Mrs Merkel in 2009 was barely enough to cover their trades in US-based toxic derivatives. It was certainly not enough to cover what they had lent to the governments of Italy, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Greece – a total of €477 billion, of which a hefty €102 billion had been lent to Athens. If Greece lost its capacity to meet its repayments,3 German banks faced another loss that would require of Mrs Merkel another cheque for anything between €340 billion and €406 billion, but consummate politician that she is, the chancellor knew she would be committing political suicide were she to return to the Bundestag to request such an amount.
Between them, the leaders of France and Germany had a stake of around €1 trillion in not allowing the Greek government to tell the truth; that is, to confess to its bankruptcy. Yet they still had to find a way to bail out their bankers a second time without telling their parliaments that this was what they were doing. As Jean-Claude Juncker, then prime minister of Luxembourg and later president of the European Commission, once said, ‘When it becomes serious, you have to lie.’4
After a few weeks they figured out their fib: they would portray the second bailout of their banks as an act of solidarity with the profligate and lazy Greeks, who while unworthy and intolerable were still members of the European family and would therefore have to be rescued. Conveniently, this necessitated providing them with a further gargantuan loan with which to pay off their French and German creditors, the failing banks. There was, however, a technical hitch that would have to be overcome first: the clause in the eurozone’s founding treaty that banned the financing of government debt by the EU. How could they get round it? The conundrum was solved by a typical Brussels fudge, that unappetizing dish that the Europeans, especially the British, have learned to loathe.
First, the new loans would not be European but international, courtesy of cutting the IMF into the deal. To do this would require the IMF to bend its most sacred rule: never lend to a bankrupt government before its debt has had a ‘haircut’ – been restructured. But the IMF’s then managing director, Dominic Strauss-Kahn, desperate to save the banks of the nation he planned to lead two years down the track, was on hand to persuade the IMF’s internal bureaucracy to turn a blind eye. With the IMF on board, Europeans could be told that it was the international community, not just the EU, lending to the Greeks for the higher purpose of underpinning the global financial system. Perish the thought that this was an EU bailout for an EU member state, let alone for German and French banks!
Second, the largest portion of the loans, to be sourced in Europe, would not come from the EU per se; they would be packaged as a series of bilateral loans – that is to say, from Germany to Greece, from Ireland to Greece, from Slovenia to Greece, and so on – with each bilateral loan of a size reflecting the lender’s relative economic strength, a curious application of Karl Marx’s maxim ‘from each according to his capacity to each according to his need’. So, of every €1000 handed over to Athens to be passed on to the French and German banks, Germany would guarantee €270, France €200, with the remaining €530 guaranteed by the smaller and poorer countries.5 This was the beauty of the Greek bailout, at least for France and Germany: it dumped most of the burden of bailing out the French and German banks onto taxpayers from nations even poorer than Greece, such as Portugal and Slovakia. They, together with unsuspecting taxpayers from the IMF’s co-funders such as Brazil and Indonesia, would be forced to wire money to the Paris and Frankfurt banks.
Unaware of the fact that they were actually paying for the mistakes of French and German bankers, the Slovaks and the Finns, like the Germans and the French, believed they were having to shoulder another country’s debts. Thus, in the name of solidarity with the insufferable Greeks, the Franco-German axis planted the seeds of loathing between proud peoples.
From Operation Offload to bankruptocracy
As soon as the bailout loans gushed into the Greek finance ministry, ‘Operation Offload’ began: the process of immediately siphoning the money off back to the French and German banks. By October 2011, the German banks’ exposure to Greek public debt had been reduced by a whopping €27.8 billion to €91.4 billion. Five months later, by March 2012, it was down to less than €795 million. Meanwhile the French banks were offloading even faster: by September 2011 they had unburdened themselves of €63.6 billion of Greek government bonds, before totally eliminating them from their books in December 2012. The operation was thus completed within less than two years. This was what the Greek bailout had been all about.
