Sunday, November 27, 2011

Applause for dealing directly with creditors!

Hear, hear! Greece has allegedly begun direct negotiations with her creditors. Now that would be a giant leap forward in the process of arranging the rescheduling of Greece’s debt! They might even trigger the next step which would be asking all creditors to appoint a Steering Committee with which Greece can formally negotiate.

Normally, countries which encounter debt service problems have to deal directly with creditors from the start. The creditors form a Steering Committee which serves as negotiating partner for the country.

That way, the country’s creditors remain “on the hook” from the start which is an absolute “must” in any debt negotiation.

Normally, a country doesn’t even have another alternative. Should the country, instead, go to foreign governments for help, those governments would – normally – send them right back to the negotiation table with their creditors. “Normally”; that is provided that those foreign governments are not members of the EU who didn’t know what they were doing.

This process of dealing with Greece’s debt problems was, pardon the expression, srewed up from the start by EU-elites. That has led to the perversion that risk-takers could mandate the politicians what to do instead of politicians mandating risk-takers to remain risk-carriers.

It is late in the game for Greece to change strategy and one can assume that not everyone between Paris-Brussels-Berlin will be happy with that. But it’s certainly worth a try.

I mean, those are not boy scouts on the other side of the negotiation table either! They did have the gull, back in July, to call something a 21% haircut when in actual fact it was a ploy with NPVs and, back in October, they had the nerve to insist on a significant increase in interest rates at a time when, again normally, interest rates are reduced to minimum levels.

EU-elites have not had the guts to call the bluff of the financial industry. Perhaps Greece can go down into history for having done that. That would be worth some applause!

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