Everyone knows the famous words pronounced in late September of 1938 by
Winston Churchill intended for British Prime Minister, at the time, Neville
Chamberlain, after the Munich agreement by which Great Britain and France
had abandoned Czechoslovakia to Hitler: “You had the choice between war and
dishonor. You chose dishonor and you will have war.”[]
All things considered, the same formula applies to the agreement between
Europeans about the Greek public finance crisis: the Europeans agreed that
the financial support promised to Greece provides for recourse, for at least
a third of the needs, to the International Monetary Fund.
This decision is absurd: the IMF has no particular expertise in domestic
debt, as it was so engrossed in its story of balance of payments problems;
however, Greece, which is part of the Eurogroup, has no balance of payment
problem, but a problem of servicing the public debt. Moreover, this
decision, which caused a cowardly relief, is disgraceful because it entrusts
saving the euro to an international financial institution today completely
dominated by the United States (regardless of the qualities and
nationalities of those who run it); while Europeans, who own 30% of votes in
the IMF have never managed to have any weight and have all the means to
ensure the solidity of their own currency, the European Investment Bank, for
example can very easily mobilize the resources needed to reduce the
speculators.
This surrender is even more absurd as it will not prevent the disaster. No
one on the markets, (which determine the fate of indebted countries) indeed
believe that the IMF, as it is now built, will succeed in imposing to the
Greeks conditions that are politically unacceptable. And each of the players
on these markets knows that the U.S. has no interest in saving the euro,
however occupied they are to maintain the dollar’s position as the unique
currency reference, condition of the financing of their own deficits.
Markets are thus going to charge more and more Greece for its loans, who is
rushing to default. And calls from Greece to the most speculative lenders are
not a very good sign.
Instead of threatening, as have just done France or others, to trigger a
crisis about the reform of the Common Agricultural Policy to support massive
subsidies received by a few billionaires farm, it would have been better to
accept a crisis in Europe on the support of Greece. It would not have been
very long: the Germans cannot afford to let the euro sink.
And France and Great Britain cannot afford it even less. Because, after
Greece, Spain and some others, these two great countries will end up being
with their vertiginous debts, in the front row. And it’s the same IMF that
will eventually impose severe budget cuts and adjustments as brutal as would
have allowed a devaluation before the euro.
We know the result. Two years later, after Munich, Winston Churchill became
Prime Minister and promised his people “blood, sweat and tears”.