Thread: Greece Islands Will Not Be Loan Collateral Warns PM

Greece's islands will not be offered as loan collateral, warns prime minister

As EU finance ministers prepare for a meeting on the Greek crisis, George Papandreou insists: 'To ask us for an island or a monument as a guarantee is nearly an insult'

Heather Stewart and Andrew Clark
The Observer, Sunday 15 May 2011
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Greece's prime minister, George Papandreou: 'The people expect our word and our actions are a sufficient guarantee.' Photograph: Aris Messinis/AFP/Getty Images

Greece's prime minister has hit out at fellow European nations for demanding "islands or monuments" as security for bailout loans ahead of a gathering of European finance ministers in Brussels on Monday to discuss the country's ailing finances.

Despite the conviction in financial markets that Greece's debts are unsustainable and will ultimately have to be restructured, eurozone ministers appear determined to top up last year's €110bn (£96bn) rescue package while forcing the beleaguered country into an ever tighter fiscal squeeze.

Prime minister George Papandreou gave a hint on Saturday of his frustration over the terms being discussed by creditor nations, which include Germany and France, by suggesting that they might demand a mortgage over Greece's historic antiquities – or even a lien over some of the country's Aegean islands.

"I want to add one thing on which we are very sensitive: to ask us for an island or a monument as a guarantee is nearly an insult," Papandreou told Italy's Corriere della Sera newspaper. "The people expect our word and our actions are a sufficient guarantee."

Athens has announced a list of state assets, from airports to motorways, that will be sold off to raise €50bn over four years, but there are concerns that the process has stalled. The country will come under pressure to step up austerity measures in exchange for a fresh bailout at Monday's meeting.

Michael Derks, chief strategist at broker FxPro, said eurozone countries are reluctant to loosen the terms of loans: "They don't want a restructuring, so they're going for the Band-Aid approach. Europe will probably say, 'Here's some extra money, but get on with the asset sales faster, then pay us back.'"

Officials from the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund are expected to complete their latest assessment of the austerity programme on Wednesday. But Ollie Rehn, the EU's monetary affairs commissioner, pre-empted its findings on Friday, warning "additional measures" would be needed after the latest forecasts showed Athens's debts would hit 166% of GDP next year, much worse than previously thought.

A new rescue package – involving tough new conditions – could be announced within a fortnight. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the IMF's managing director, will travel to Berlin today to discuss the options with German chancellor Angela Merkel. George Osborne has won an assurance from his EU counterparts that Britain would not be forced to contribute to any new bailout.

A growing number of analysts now believe the ultimate outcome of the ongoing debt crisis will be that one or more countries – Greece being the first – will eventually leave the single currency.

"The longer this goes on, the more you increase the likelihood of serious damage to the relationship between the member states, and the more you risk the erosion of what remains a fairly sturdy consensus in favour of membership," said Simon Tilford, chief economist at the Centre for European Reform.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011 ... e-minister

Greek crisis forces thousands of Athenians into rural migration

Debt, unemployment and poverty is causing mass unrest and thousands to seek a cheaper lifestyle outside the capital

Helena Smith in Andritsaina, Arcadia
guardian.co.uk, Friday 13 May 2011 18.48 BST



shopper walks past an Athens store shop closed due to the economic crisis. Thousands of city dwellers are heading to rural areas to find a cheaper lifestyle. Photograph: Orestis Panagiotou/EPA

High in the hills of Arcadia, in a big stone house on the edge of this village overlooking verdant pastures and a valley beyond, a group of young Athenians are busy rebuilding their lives.

Until recently Andritsaina was not much of a prospect for urban Greeks. "But that," said Yiannis Dikiakos, "was before Athens turned into the explosive cauldron that it has become. We woke up one day and thought we've had enough. We want to live the real Greece and we want to live it somewhere else."

Piling his possessions into a Land Rover and trailer, the businessman made the 170-mile journey to Andritsaina last month. As he drove past villages full of derelict buildings and empty homes, along roads that wound their way around rivers and ravines, he did not look back.

"Athens has failed its young people. It has nothing to offer them any more. Our politicians are idiots … they have disappointed us greatly," said Dikiakos, who will soon be joined by 10 friends who have also decided to escape the capital.

They are part of an internal migration, thousands of Greeks seeking solace in rural areas as the debt-stricken country grapples with its gravest economic crisis since the second world war.

"It's a big decision but people are making it," said Giorgos Galos, a teacher in Proti Serron on the great plains of Macedonia, in northern Greece. "We've had two couples come here and I know lots in Thessaloniki [Greece's second biggest city] who want to go back to their villages. The crisis is eating away at them and they're finding it hard to cope. If they had just a little bit of support, a little bit of official encouragement, the stream would turn into a wave because everything is just so much cheaper here."

The trickle into Proti Serron might have gone unnoticed had the village not also been the birthplace of the late Konstantinos Karamanlis who oversaw the nation's entry into the then European Economic Community in 1981. An alabaster white statue of the statesman in the village square is adorned with the words: "I believe that Greece can change shape and its people their fate."

Nearly sixty years after they were uttered, a growing number of Greeks, at least, are beginning to wonder whether the old man was right. The drift towards the bright lights of the big cities were by Karamanlis' own admission one of the great barometers of the country's transition from a primarily agricultural society into an advanced western economy.This week, as the IMF and EU debated ways of trying to re-rescue Greece and observers openly wondered whether the country would have to leave the euro, Greece appeared more adrift than ever, tossed on a high sea of mounting anger and civil disobedience from people who have lost trust in their politicians, and at the mercy of markets that refuse to believe it can pull itself back from the brink of bankruptcy. "The reality is that these people, they are in deep shit," the managing director of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn said recently. "If we had not come they would have fallen into the abyss. Two weeks later the government would not have been able to pay civil servants' wages."

Ironically, it is the medicine doled out under last year's draconian EU-IMF €110bn (£96bn) rescue programme, implemented to modernise a sclerotic economy, that has made their lot worse. Twelve months of sweeping public sector pay and pension cuts, massive job losses, tax increases and galloping inflation have begun to have a brutal effect. GDP is predicted to contract by 3% this year – making Greece's the deepest recession in Europe.

In Athens, home to almost half of Greece's 11 million-strong population, the signs of austerity – and poverty – are everywhere: in the homeless and hungry who forage through municipal rubbish bins late at night; in the cash-strapped pensioners who pick up rejects at the street markets that sell fruit and vegetables; in the shops now boarded and closed and in the thousands of ordinary Greeks who can no longer afford to take family outings or regularly eat meat.

"We've had to give up tavernas, give up buying new clothes and give up eating meat more than once a week," said Vasso Vitalis, a mother-of-two who struggles with her civil servant husband to make ends meet on a joint monthly income of €2,000.

"With all the cuts we estimate we've lost around €450 a month. We're down to the last cent and, still, we're lucky. We've both got jobs. I know people who are unemployed and are going hungry. They ask family and friends for food," she sighed. "What makes us mad is that everybody knew the state was a mess but none of our politicians had the guts to mend it. It was like a ship heading for the rocks and now the rocks are very near."

Greeks also know that with their economy needing another financial lifeline, and few willing to lend to a country in such a parlous state, it will also get much worse before it gets better.

"In the past, the future always implied hope for Greeks but now it implies fear," said Nikos Filis, editor of the leftwing Avgi newspaper. "Until this week people thought that with all the measures the crisis would be over in a year or two. Now with the prospect of yet more austerity for more aid, they can't see an end in sight."

With unemployment officially nudging 790,000 – although believed to be far bigger with the closure of some 150,000 small and medium-sized businesses over the past year – there are fears that Greece, the country at the centre of Europe's worst financial debacle in decades, is slipping inexorably into political and social crisis, too. Rising racist tensions and lawlessness on the streets this week spurred the softly spoken mayor of Athens, Giorgos Kaminis, to describe the city as "beginning to resemble Beirut".

Yannis Caloghirou, an economics professor at the National Technical University of Athens, said: "Greece has become a battleground, at the EU level where policymakers have made the crisis worse with their lack of strategy and piecemeal approach, and among its own people who no longer have trust in institutions and the ability of the political system to solve the situation. My concern is that the country is slipping into ungovernability, that ultra-right groups and others will grab the moment."

Nineteen months into office the ruling socialists, riven by dissent and increasingly disgust over policies that ideologically many oppose, are likewise beginning to show the strain of containing the crisis, with the prime minister, George Papandreou, being forced publicly to whip truculent ministers into line.

A mass exodus of the nation's brightest and best has added to fears that in addition to failing one or perhaps two generations, near-bankrupt Greece stands as never before to lose its intellectual class. "Nobody is speaking openly about this but the prospects for the Greek economy are going to get much worse as the brain drain accelerates and the country loses its best minds," said Professor Lois Lambrianidis, who teaches regional economics at the University of Macedonia.

"Around 135,000, or 9% of tertiary educated Greeks, were living abroad and that was before the crisis began. They simply cannot find jobs in a service-oriented economy that depends on low-paid cheap labour."

Just as in Arcadia where the young are choosing to start anew, Greece, he says, needs to rebuild itself if it is to survive its worst crisis in modern times.
Greece in numbers

GDP forecast: 3% in 2011 (worst in Europe)

GDP: €230bn

Debts: €340bn

Annual government revenue: €40bn

Debts per person: €30,000

Unemployment: 16%

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/ma ... -migration