ATHENS – Outgoing German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, perhaps the most pessimistic of Greece’s critics during a now more than 7 ½-year-long economic crisis, said he now thinks it’s on a path to return to the markets.
Three bailouts of 326 billion euros ($383.67 billion) from international lenders have done nothing to stop Greece’s debt from growing – even Prime Minister and Radical Left SYRIZA Alexis Tsipas, who’s upbeat in his irrepressible optimism said it can’t be repaid – will run out at the end of August, 2018.
A test market return in July for 3 billion euros was sold but at interest rates more than three times what the bailout costs, not auguring well for how much Greece would have repay investors, those who weren’t scared off after Greece burned them with 74 percent losses six years ago in a failed bid to cut down the debt.
Germany is the biggest contributor to the bailouts but has been the harshest taskmaster in getting harsh austerity measures in return to insure banks will be repaid, and Schaeuble has been relentless in pushing successive governments to keep imposing brutal conditions on workers, pensioners and the poor while the rich, politicians and tax cheats escape.
Without explaining why, Schaeuble told the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that Greece suddenly is on a “good path” after repeating saying it was on bad roads for years and that it would lure buyers for bonds again.
“That’s why any discussion over whether or not Grexit would be better doesn’t help at all in the present,” he added, referring to any speculation the country would leave the Eurozone even as it’s locked in tough talks with the Troika of the European Union-European Central Bank-European Stability Mechanism (EU-ECB-ESM) after unfinished terms of a third bailout, this one for 86 billion euros ($101.21 billion) that Tsipras sought and accepted in July, 2015 after saying he would do neither. Asked if the Eurozone crisis is over, the usually demonstrative Schaeuble said only, “I hope so”.
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Source: thenationalherald.com
