For years Georgios Papakonstantinou wanted bodyguards to maneuver round Greece. The previous technocrat, who labored on the OECD for a very long time, discovered himself propelled into one of many worst financial crises when he turned Greece’s finance minister between 2009 and 2011. It was he who revealed that the deficit his nation’s price range had been disguised in October 2009. He once more needed to negotiate the primary of three rescue plans for Greece, of 110 billion euros, to keep away from the chapter of his nation. The situations imposed by the donors – the Worldwide Financial Fund and the European Union -, with very harsh austerity, earned him the resentment of the Greeks.
Twenty years after the euro was launched as a fiat forex – banknotes and cash entered into circulation on 1er January 2002 – the one who’s now a professor on the European College Institute takes inventory of the only forex.
Twenty years after the launch of the euro banknotes and cash, what’s your evaluation?
It’s a success, within the sense that the euro is used increasingly more and its existence just isn’t unsure. However the single forex disaster (2010-2015) highlighted its building flaws. Economists had spoken about it when it was created, however till then we had pretended to disregard them.
Once you reveal that the Greek deficit is larger than acknowledged within the statistics, do you count on to set off a significant disaster?
Completely not. We thought we had been going to have an adjustment of only a few years. We had not understood that the fiscal disaster was hiding a deep disaster in Greek establishments.
Has the response of the remainder of the European Union not made the disaster worse?
There have been structural issues in Greece and a recession was inevitable. However we had been very annoyed to see that the donors didn’t give us time to redress the nation and that they didn’t need to see the duty of the euro zone. The structural adjustment program may have been unfold over an extended interval to cut back austerity. Our debt may have been restructured extra shortly, to cut back the fee.
In the course of the first six months of the disaster, Europe noticed it solely as a Greek downside, not as a eurozone downside. The Germans refused to say that they’d not allow us to go bankrupt when, quite the opposite, the « bazooka » would have needed to be launched by guaranteeing that there could be no exit from the euro zone, with a purpose to curb the contagion. of the disaster. Decreasing wages and pensions in Greece was not sufficient …
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