Published by Financial Times,
February 13, 2017
Failure to tell truth to power lies beneath much of what is going wrong in Europe right now. It may not be the principal cause of the Greek debt crisis, which is now on its umpteenth iteration. But it is more than a mere contributing factor.
You notice it particularly at those moments when others speak the truth, as the staff of the International Monetary Fund have done recently. In its latest survey of the Greek economy it states that “public debt has reached 179 per cent [of gross domestic product] at end-2015, and is unsustainable”.
Europeans are not used to such bluntness. The Germans protested. The European Commission protested. So did the Greeks. They all want to keep up the fairy tale of Greek debt sustainability for a little while longer.
They were particularly shocked that the IMF exposed the disagreement when it wrote that “some directors had different views on the fiscal path and debt sustainability”. These were the Europeans, who are now in a minority in the fund.
Once the Trump administration sends its representatives to the IMF board, expect the climate to become even more hostile. My expectation is that the IMF will ultimately pull out of the Greek programme, leaving the Europeans free to mismanage the ongoing Greek crisis on their own.
Read more at http://www.defenddemocracy.press/wolfgang-munchau-a-failure-to-tell-the-truth-imperils-greece/
