New Greek Finance Minister: he devised a way
to get Papandreou off the hook, he steered Greece into the Euro in 2001.
The plot thickens.
 Yannis
Stournaris
How
a top German consultancy fed the Greeks a lifeline...to no avail.
Yannis Stournaras, the
new Minister of Finance in Greece, has landed himself a pole-position job.
Stournaras is something of a thoroughbred old-Establishment Greek
politician: he emerged as a force in the old days of Kostas Simitis, the
former Prime Minister of Greece, who - as one source put it earlier this
week - "was the master builder of the greek tragedy right at the
outset". It isn't meant as a compliment.
The facts bear this
out: one way and another, Simitis schemed to disguise the chronic problems
of the Greek economy and get Greece into the Eurozone. During the period of
his governance, official data presented inflation as having decreased from
15% to 3%, public deficits diminished from 14% to 3%, with GDP allegedly
increasing at an annual average of 4% - and actual labour incomes
increasing at a rate of 3% per year. It was largely a tissue of lies that
Eurostat had caught onto by 2006: whenever any Sprout or Europol tells you
the Greek collapse came as a shock to Berlin-am-Brussels after Papandreou came
to power, you know you are in the presence of a fool or a liar. The
eurozoners knew from Day One that Greece was a potential liability....but
it suited theur hubris-fuelled ambition to have them in.
Stournaras's nickname
in Greece is 'Mr Euro'. Frequently described as 'the man who steered Greece
into the eurozone', he was chief economic adviser and a very close aide to
former Prime Minister Costas Simitis when Greece was negotiating euro entry
up until 2001.
In October 2011, Yannis
Stournaras proposed and formed a Greek sovereign debt reduction scheme
called KAPPA (Initiative for Protection and Exploitation of
Govermental Real Estate ).
The proposal envisaged
the establishment of a public company to offer a diversified portfolio of
real estate and movable assets, which will then be sold to a European body
(European Investment Bank or EFSF), and be disbursed immediately as
€75 billion to massively reduce Greek public debt.
Codenamed
"Archimedes", it was in reality the brainchild of multinational
consultancy giant Roland Berger - by far the biggest management consultancy
in Germany, it turns over a whopping €0.8 billion per annum...and is based in
Frankfurt. In September 2011, it had presented an ingenious plan in that
City of Bankers to a Greek delegation led by Stournaras. In full, its
recommendations suggested bundling Greek state assets worth €125 bn
into a holding company, and selling it to the EU. This company would issue
bonds, and the Greek State would be allowed to use these.
Had
it gone ahead, Roland Berger predicted it would reduce Greek debt from 145%
to 88% of GDP.
Enthusiastic about the
idea, Stournaras submitted RB's plan to the Papandreou goverment and the Troika
together a month later. They r ejected it, and instead, Papandreou,
the IMF, and the ECB chose the far more risky (and, as it turned out,
damaging) option of private bondholder haircuts and a second bailout.
It's hard not to make
two simple empirical observations at this point: as the Slogpost of three days ago
demonstrated, Berlin conspired with Greece eighteen months
before these events to exaggerate the Greek deficit (in order to ensure
full eurozone contributions to the bailout). Now here the Troika was,
looking a relative gift horse in the mouth....and turning it down.
One can only
suspect that, had a smaller deficit in 2009 and a sale of assets to
Brussels rather than a depressed open market in 2011 gone forward, Greece
would've got back a great deal of its independent sovereignty and access to
the markets than subsequently occurred. And the extrapolation from that in
turn is that Merkel, Schäuble, Brussels and Lagarde have done everything in
their power to reduce the chances of Greece retaining its independence.
So
we can reasonably assume that this is more or less what the unlucky members
answering directly to Obersturmbannführer Schäuble under the Faskal Union
can expect.....more of the same.
And while we're down
here, another little afterthought: Roland Berger is at present actively
involved in a scheme to create a eurozone ratings agency....the €300
million start-up cost to be funded by a consortium of German banks in
Frankfurt. Just fancy that.
Although
this exclusive story achieved reasonably high hits, it ought to have gone
viral: we are looking here at a cordinated sovereign State/Central Bank
plot during 2008 to manipulate LIBOR rates....yet again, to save the banks.
If anyone wants to comment thread on this at high-circulation sites
(especially in the States) I would deem that a great favour. The US public
needs to be reminded just how totally it has been raped in myriad ways by
these monsters.
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