Greek Debt Swindle Is Still in the Midst of Crisis

Since the “success” of the Eurogroup meeting Feb. 20, as proclaimed in Wall Street and London media, the euro, oil, other commodity prices, and U.S. interest rates have all gone down, acknowledging that nothing was solved. Wall Street and London remain bankrupt, and their looting swindle of so-called “Greek debt” remains unpayable. Rejecting proposals to write down this illegitimate debt, rejecting offers from the BRICS countries to join new international development banks and infrastructure projects, the euro system continues to collapse.

Greece on Feb. 23 postponed for one day, until Feb. 24, its proposals to the “European institutions” to reform and revive the Greek economy. It is clear from reports by EIR contacts and from economist James Galbraith (who participated in the Feb. 20 Brussels meeting as an advisor to the Greek Finance Ministry) that these proposals do not concern an “extension” of the bailout program for “Greek debt.” The new government does not want more of that swindle; it wants forms of credit which can be invested in Greek infrastructure, production capacity, and economic revival.

Ninety percent of all international press coverage notwithstanding, Greece made no “commitment” to the three-year-old IMF/ECB/EFSF bailout terms, nor to ask for that bailout to be “extended.”

What is at stake, rather, is a four-month extension of the so-called Master Financial Assistance Facility Agreement (MFFA), by which the ECB has been propping up Greek banks with capitalization and liquidity loans. Were this to end, Greece would be forced to leave the euro. Greek banks are losing $3 billion a week in deposits, and cannot sustain this.

Galbraith also revealed, in an interview Feb. 22 with Italy’s La Repubblica, that the Feb. 20 meeting was sharply divided, especially among the German representatives. German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble would have forced Greece to leave the Eurozone immediately, by ending the MFFA. Chancellor Angela Merkel intervened to reach a “compromise” at the Feb. 20 meeting which is better described as a “ceasefire.”

Thus Greece, as Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has said,

Daily Telegraph financial columnist and British intelligence agent Ambrose Evans-Pritchard wrote late Feb. 23 that the Greek proposals had in fact gone to the Eurogroup’s “technocrats” already, and “met reservations at the first hurdle…. They face a frigid reception.” Evans-Pritchard had clearly received a leak of all the Greek proposals from one of the “technocrats.’

And so does the euro crisis — the whole trans-Atlantic crisis of bankrupt banking systems — continue unabated. Germany’s Finance Ministry, at least, seems committed to taking the fateful, crash-inducing step of forcing Greece out of the euro system. The reforms which Greece now will propose on Feb. 24, include many economic-revival steps which are hysterically refused by Wall Street’s debt swindlers.