******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ******************** #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. *****************************************************************
In the early hours of Friday morning, according to the British paper, the Daily Telegraph (DT), five key players in the Syriza government, meeting in the Maximus Mansion in Athens, took an important decision. They decided that the government would not pay the IMF its debt repayment instalment due that day. Apparently, the IMF’s Christine Lagarde was caught badly off guard. IMF officials in Washington were stunned.
The Syriza leaders had the money to pay: it had been raked up from various sources and they had told Lagarde that they would pay. But at the late hour, they decided not to pay but instead ‘bundle’ all the repayments scheduled for June into one payment at the end of June – or €1.6bn. This was allowable under IMF rules but had only happened once before – by Zambia in the 1980s.
The reason that PM Tsipras, finance minister Varoufakis and the other Greek government leaders decided to hold back payment was two-fold. First, they were really angry that the IMF and the Eurogroup had completely refused to make any serious compromises on the terms of an agreement to release outstanding funds under the existing ‘bailout’ package, despite the Greeks making huge concessions in the negotiations over the last few months since an extension was agreed last February. Also, the leaders knew that their Syriza party members and MPs were incandescent with rage at the attitude of the Troika (IMF, EU, ECB). There was no way that they were going to support any deal along the lines of yet further austerity and neoliberal measures demanded by the Troika. So the Greeks have fired a warning shot across the bows of the IMF and the Eurogroup, hinting that they may prefer to default rather than be forced into further concessions.
full: https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2015/06/06/ten-minutes-past-midnight/
_________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
