17/08/2012
There is no summer break for the crisis says a weary
Die Welt, reporting that Greece's public debt rose to â¬303.5 billion at the end of July, up from â¬280.2 billion at the end of March.
According to figures released by Greece's Finance Ministry, the peak debt was reached in the fourth quarter of last year, when it stood at an all-time record of â¬367.9 billion.
Despite the bailouts, despite the austerity programme, despite selling off government assets, therefore, debt is going back up again. No wonder the German papers yesterday
were screaming that Greece must go bankrupt, with
earlier sentiment telling us that that the Greek austerity plan was not realistic.
Nor is the grief confined to the Hellenic Republic. According to the paper, nearly ten percent of loans in Spain have gone "bad".
The Spanish National Bank has announced that, at the end of June, 9.42 percent of all borrowers - from private citizen to companies - were at least three months in arrears. These loans amounted to more than â¬164 billion, eight billion more than in May.
Small wonder, then, that Spanish banks want â¬100 billion in refinancing, while in Brussels, officials are already preparing the upcoming weeks for what
Die Welt calls a "hot autumn". This will start, says the paper, with the next troika report, which will be relentless in exposing the Greek fiasco.
In the first week of September, auditors of the EU commission, the ECB and the IMF will travel to Athens again and, if the expected testimony from them is as devastating as feared, payment of the next â¬31-billion tranche of the bailout to Athens is questionable.
Even before the troika report, there is the widespread reported funding gap of â¬20 billion, although some are saying it could be twice as high. And yet, despite all that, we get
Reuters reporting that growing numbers of economists have changed their minds and conclude that the country's fate lies inside the currency union rather than out.
Greece's future in the eurozone is no longer an economic question but one of political willpower, which remains firm in Athens and Brussels, in spite of opposition from politicians in Germany, the agency reports.
So there we are â exactly what we've been saying all along â this is a political rather than an economic issue. But it would be unwise to under-rate the Germans. They will have the final say.
