The electorate would do well to ask what Nick Clegg thinks
about the Greek disaster.
AS BBC economics correspondent Stephanie Flanders blogged this afternoon, ‘this is defeat for Greece – but not yet default’. I suspect the ‘not yet’ was a Freudian slip: credit managements and currency traders wrote Greece off as dead meat last week. This morning, Papandreou rang both EU and IMF officials and yelled ‘Fire!’. It would’ve been better for the Euro if he’d sounded desperate earlier, and Geli Merkel wasn’t quite such a harpie – then the fire engine might have got there before all forty storeys were ablaze. But The Slog sticks to its view that Merkel knew the Greeks were a basket case – and anyway, had her own restrictive Constitution to consider. She has done us all a favour in the long run.
For the second time today, the Greek budget deficit projection jumped – this time from 12.7% to 13.9%. Last year, the OECD was issuing warnings that the Athens deficit could rise to 6% of GDP in 2010.
Of course last year, the Greek Government was lying – just like ours is now. And because of that, the bond yield percentage has quintupled in just three months.
This is how a compound of dithering leads to doom: all the numbers keep going up and up.
I wonder what the bevy of economist academics supporting Gordon and his Gang think now – as Labour’s Mandelson & Co continue to call Tory warnings ‘scaremongering’…but the evidence from the realists becomes increasingly solid.
I wonder what they make of the ONS numbers showing that the UK economy cannot sustain the deficit repayment schedule.
I wonder what they make of PIMCO calling time on Western debt.
I wonder what they make of a trebling of the UK’s required bond yields since February.
I wonder if any of them have a scintilla of sound housekeeping sense in their too-clever-by-half heads anywhere.
Mainly, however, I wonder what the markets will make of three innumerate British Party leaders squabbling over the distribution of power after May 6th. Or rather, I did – until I read Jeremy Warner’s brilliant piece in the Telegraph yesterday morning. This spells it out for any citizen who can read – and project forward. For as the 2005 Blairite slogan had it, ‘Forward not Back’.
Have a good weekend.
The Slog 