Greece readies reform promises after Eurogroup climbdown

[FLPanhandle]

Source: Reuters

(Reuters) - Greece's government prepared reform measures on Sunday to secure a financial lifeline from the euro zone, but was attacked for selling "illusions" to voters after failing to keep a promise to extract the country from its international bailout.

Leftist Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has insisted Greece achieved a negotiating success when euro zone finance ministers agreed to extend the bailout deal for four months, provided it came up with a list of reforms by Monday.

Tsipras maintains he has the nation behind him despite staging a climbdown in Brussels. Under the deal, Greece will still live under the EU/IMF bailout which he had pledged to scrap, and must negotiate a new programme by the early summer.

Top Marxist members of Tsipras's Syriza party, a broad coalition of the left, have so far been silent on the painful compromises made to win agreement from the Eurogroup.

Read more: http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/02/22/uk-eurozone-greece-idUKKBN0LQ0HO20150222

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The list of reforms will be the first non-talking action from Tsipras. I'm curious what spending cuts he is going to make and where; then how he sells that to the Greeks while still trying to keep his campaign promises.

Maybe this will build support within Greece for an exit from the EU, something that probably needs to be done but doesn't' have public support...yet.

[DCBob]

1. Do you know if they can exit the Euro without exiting the EU?

If so would that be preferable?

[FLPanhandle]

2. IMHO, The debt is what's killing them

At this point, Greece probably should just default.

If they do default, I don't see them having an option of staying in the EU.

Euro/Drachma/Dollar or whatever they choose to use for currency won't matter as much if they owe all those Euros.

[DCBob]

3. Yeah but that not going to be pretty. I really don't see a soft landing here.

I think Greece is headed for near third world status no matter what.

[muriel_volestrangler]

7. There's no suggested, or definite, mechanism for leaving the euro

so 'can they exit the Euro without exiting the EU' can only be answered with 'maybe, depending on what someone comes up with'.

[JackRiddler]

10. Euro and EU are not the same thing.

Many EU members are not in the Eurozone.

Greece absolutely can exit the euro without leaving the EU. It shall remain within the EU, demand its rights as a member state, and agitate for change in its profoundly undemocratic and economically unjust structures. Only within the EU can there be a just solution for taking care of all the refugees whom Greece is hosting on Europe's behalf.

It will be a disorderly exit from the euro, of necessity. The deal buys time to prepare the most important part, which is getting the people behind it.

[geek tragedy]

4. the ship holding the hopes of campaign promises crashes against the reef of governing reality nt

[bhikkhu]

5. Parallels here come to mind

...though the promises were more carefully worded and less explicit.

[geek tragedy]

6. I'd also say the US under Obama (a) is doing a thousand times better than Greece; and (2)

the track record for promises kept, though not perfect, has been not that bad actually.

[newthinking]

8. Of course we are doing better. We own the world currency and can print money

and buy back our own bonds and go into Trillions of debt to continue an illusion.

Not that I don't think that Obama has been better than the alternative, but the house of cards *will* collapse at some point and it will be just as bad and probably much worse when it does. That is unless we somehow turn the cycle and get truly deep reform.

[libdem4life]

9. We are trillions from solvency as you say, and we keep sucking up other countries while merrily

printing more dollars. It is far past reform, as I see it, and ultimately we are Greece on a geometrical scale.

"So using the above figures from the U.S. Government, we can calculate the following per capita debt figures.

Each U.S. household’s share of the National Debt is just over $105,000.

Each U.S. resident’s share of the National Debt is just over $39,000.

These “per capita debt” figures are just one way of illustrating how serious the National Debt problem is in this country. If you are concerned about the growth in the National Debt, let your Congressman and Senators know how you feel."

http://thenationaldebtcrisis.com/per-capita-debt/

[JackRiddler]

11. Your comment is boring, smug, defeatist, premature and unjustifiably supremacist.

But other than that.

[pampango]

12. Krugman: Greece Did OK - "in significantly better shape, at least for now."

One way to see this is through careful parsing of the language, as done here. That’s quite useful. But I’d argue that in an important sense we’re past that kind of word-chopping. Instead, we need to think about what happens substantively from here out.

Right now, Greece has avoided a credit cutoff, and worse yet an ECB move to pull the plug on its banks, and it has done so while getting the 2015 primary surplus target effectively waived.

The next step will come four months from now, when Greece makes its serious pitch for lower surpluses in future years. We don’t know how that will go. But nothing that just happened weakens the Greek position in that future round. Suppose that the Germans claim that some ambiguously worded clause should be interpreted to mean that Greece must achieve a 4.5 percent of GDP surplus, after all. Greece will say no, it doesn’t — and then what? A couple of years ago, when all the VSPs of Europe believed utterly in austerity, Greece might have faced retaliation thanks to wording issues; not now.

So Greece has won relaxed conditions for this year, and breathing room in the run-up to the bigger fight ahead. Could be worse.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/greece-did-ok/

[quadrature]

13. can I suggest a deal? how about ...

how about...

the EU takes over debt service, and pays for
'international stuff' like the Greek Coast Guard.

the Greeks agree to operate gov't
on a cash basis, pay-out only with tax-revenue in-hand

for a year or two

[muriel_volestrangler]

14. Greece debt deal: Reforms will 'combat tax evasion'

Greece will crack down on tax evasion and streamline its civil service in its bid to secure a bailout extension, minister of state Nikos Pappas says.
...
Mr Pappas said the reforms being proposed would take the Greek economy "out of sedation".

"We are compiling a list of measures to make the Greek civil service more effective and to combat tax evasion," he told Greece's Mega Channel.

He added that talks this week would be "a daily battle... every centimetre of ground must be won with effort".

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-31574868