Do frontmen disguise who’s behind them?

Do you, like me, feel increasingly anxious about the degree to which our leaders seem to be seven beats behind the music? Or, even worse, playing from the wrong sheet of music?

The International Monetary Fund warned the eurozone yesterday that it may be forced to write off a chunk of Greece‘s debt after identifying an $11bn black hole in the finances of the recession-stricken country. In its regular update on the programme of financial austerity and structural change agreed to by Athens in return for financial help, Frou-Frou Lagarde’s IMF said weak growth and a sluggish pace of reform had opened up a funding gap in both 2014 and 2015. The IMF, which is struggling to persuade developing countries to back Greece’s bailout, said “debt sustainability” continued to be a risk.

The words I love in there are ‘warned’, ‘may be’, ‘update’, ‘funding gap’, and ‘debt sustainability’. Stringing those together into a sentence from Planet Earth, it might read like this: ‘The IMF reminded the Brussels Sprouts for the nth time that a funds write-off was inevitable given the events seen in the rear-view mirror. It pointed out too that there was no way Greece could, mathematically given the terms of Bailout2, ever pay off the debt.’

But the Reuters observations are also missing one other big fact: this will be the first time in its history that the IMF has had to write off a Sovereign debt. Five years ago, the world would have gulped at that fact, and declared a Greek default, done and dusted. That’s what should happen the second the Fund writes off the loan, but don’t hold your breath.

The only crumb of comfort is that this historic event happened on Lagarde’s watch. A silly, pompous woman who knows less than nothing about economic essentials (and less still about budget management) Cristine Lagarde is the woman who, when French Finance Minister, told the world, “Well, there will be a stress test [of French banks] and then everyone will see there is no problem”. She is the woman who worked with Geithner and others to keep the South Americans sweet, and get her elected head of the IMF. And she is the person who benefited most from the downfall of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a saga above which there will always be clouds.

It often feels to me like these ‘political’ buffoons  are fulfilling an obfuscatory role as smoke to get in the eyes of those not watching the real movers and shakers out there. Behind the incompetent EC there is Draghi. Behind Squeaky Osborne there is Carney. Behind Lagarde there is the State Department. Behind Bernanke there is the Goldman dominated Fed Treasury. Behind Obama there is the CIA. Behind Rudd is the mining industry. Behind Jeremy Hunt there is the wispy JHJ Lewis. And behind our ‘free’ press there are Murdoch, the Barclay twins and assorted former pornographers.

The clowns love to be onscreen; but behind the screen, perhaps, the real business is being done.

Last night at The Slog: The hidden significance of taramasalata.