After three years of crushing austerity measures and imposing losses of 74 percent on private investors to write down its debt by $134 billion, Greece still owes 321 billion euros ($429.46 billion) a level that many analysts said is unsustainable.
Greece is relying on $325 billion in two bailouts from international lenders and looks to need another of 10 billion euros ($13 billion) and the coalition government of Prime Minister and New Democracy Conservative leader Antonis Samaras and his Deputy Prime Minister Evangelos Venizelos, the PASOK Socialist leader has been floating the idea of not repaying the rescue package loans in full.
As finance minister in a previous government, Venizelos was the one who hit banks and investors, including those in the Diaspora who put their money and faith into their homeland, and got burned big.
Now speculation is growing Greece will do the same to the Troika of the European Union-International Monetary Fund-European Central Bank (EU-IMF-ECB) and make taxpayers in the other 16 countries of the Eurozone pay the tab for generations of wild overspending by New Democracy and PASOK administrations who packed public payrolls with hundreds of thousands of needless workers in return for votes.
This year alone, despite austerity, the debt has gone up 16 billion euros ($21.4 billion) and 18 billion ($24.08 billion) since Samaras was elected in June of last year.
Finance Minister Yannis Stournaras, a technocrat who left an economic think tank to take the thankless job of Greek fiscal chief, has assembled a team trying to figure out what to do but a growing chorus of analysts say the only way out is to give a so-called “haircut” to the Troika which would likely spark outrage around the Eurozone but erase much of Greece’s debt without having to pay for it.
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