(Clicar aqui ou no texto para ler na íntegra este artigo de Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, no The Telegraph)
Excertos:
“[…]Mr Tsipras is clearly gambling that the Germany and the creditor powers will not let monetary union break up at this late stage, over a trivial sum of money, after having already committed €245bn, for to do so would shatter the illusion that the eurozone crisis has been solved. This may be a misjudgment.[…]
[…] We are witnessing a democratic revolution. Never before have the EMU elites had to face a eurozone government that refuses to play by any of their rules, and they have yet to experience the lascerating tongue of Yanis Varoufakis, a relentless critic of their 1930s ideology of debt-deflation and “fiscal waterboarding”.[…]
[…]The EU-IMF Troika forced a bankrupt country to take on further loan packages, allowing foreign banks to dump their bonds onto Greek taxpayers and trap Greek citizens in debt servitude. To add insult to injury, this was called a rescue.
The IMF minutes for May 2010 said Troika loans “may be seen not as a rescue of Greece, which will have to undergo a wrenching adjustment, but as a bailout of Greece’s private debt holders”. Greece suffered IMF austerity without the usual IMF cure of devaluation and debt relief. It has every right to demand redress.
Yet Mr Tsipras faces a tortured moral choice. If he defaults, he walks away from debts owed to taxpayers in countries that are also net debtors with mass unemployment. Italy’s contribution to the Greek loan package is €41bn and Italy too is in crisis. The Mezzogiorno’s GDP has fallen by 15pc since 2008, and levels of hardship are comparable to those in Greece. All of Southern Europe is on the hook due to the insidious mechanisms of EMU crisis strategy.
Syriza’s manifesto – the Thessaloniki Programme – demands cancellation of “the greater part” of Greece’s public debt, comparable to the relief secured by Germany at the London Conference in 1953, and necessary to pave the way for the post-War boom. It wants a broader “European Debt Conference” to restructure the debts of all southern European states, and in a sense it is right.
Mr Varoufaki says the eurozone will be “toast within a couple of years” unless it comes to terms with the fundamental absurdity of eurozone capital flows. Either the surpluses of the North are recycled into the South, or the bloc as whole will remain trapped in a deflationary vortex. “You can’t have a monetary union that pretends it can survive by simply lending more money to debtor countries on condition that they must shrink their income,” he told the BBC’s Paul Mason.[…]