The Maltese fiddle while Greece burns
This was my column in The Malta Independent on Sunday yesterday.
I suppose it was to be expected that discussion of the Greek debt crisis would be, in Malta, reduced to talk of Joseph Cuschieri’s utterly stupid comment on using leverage to get our sixth seat in the European Parliament.
He thinks of that seat as his, not Malta’s – perhaps because almost every newsroom on the island insists on calling him a Member of the European Parliament, when he is nothing of the sort. Joseph Cuschieri is just Joseph Cuschieri. If he doesn’t have a seat then he’s not an MEP.
You’d think that what is happening in Greece has nothing to do with us as we roll along in our cosy cocoon, turning the loss of parking-space into a national crisis, complaining about the Park and Ride scheme, playing hunt the grave-robbers and going all Great Aunt Maude because Snoop Dogg ignored reporters for hours and then called one of them nigger, reminding him where he stands on the colour charts, which he appears not to have liked one bit.
It is as though we are in the European Union but somehow detached from it, 200 miles from Tripoli but on the other side of the planet. Despite the high rate of internet use – or perhaps because it is used mainly for Facebook and chatting – we live in a tiny world of our own, perfectly illustrating why the words isolated and insular come from the Italian and Latin for island.
Why, even when we chat on Facebook, we chat to other Maltese, people we’ve seen only that same morning at the school gates or last night at a party.
Greece about to collapse, throwing the Eurozone into chaos?
“Sorry, I haven’t heard about that and I don’t know what’s happening there. I did hear something on the news, but I’m more concerned with whether or not buses are going to drive down Sliema’s new pedestrian area.”
“Oh, is the war still on in Libya? I haven’t heard anything about it for a while. Insomma, j’Alla kollox jigi ghall-gid. But to be honest, I’m more concerned about all those illegal immigrants we’re getting because of the fighting in Libya. Where are we going to put them all? It’s true that you hardly ever see black people in Malta, but I still think there must be thousands of them somewhere, hiding or in camps.”
And on it goes. Now Greece has at last taken on board a fresh tranche of austerity measures which the EU and International Monetary Fund have tied to an aid package. Without this aid – €8.7 billion from the EU and €3.3 billion from the IMF – Greece will run out of money within days and default on its massive debts.
The aid was signed off last night after the Greek parliament finally voted in favour of the austerity measures, without which it would not have received any help. Yet despite the imminent reality of destitution, those in favour outnumbered those against by just 17 of the 300 MPs.
This is not the only money that is going to be put Greece’s way. The entire bailout package amounts to €110 billion and has been the cause of much resentment in the rest of the European Union, which has to rescue Greece, rather than cutting it loose, to save itself.
The aid package was agreed in May last year, but the conditions were made very clear: unless Greece slashes spending across the board, and makes serious changes, then it is getting nothing.
Many Greek politicians appear to think they have leverage in that the EU will not allow Greece to fail because it cannot afford to do so, and so they need not slash and burn deep into the welfare state and the overburdened public sector payroll. But other European states are themselves heavily pressed economically and have dug in their heels about the conditions.
Yet still there was relief all round when news came of the Greek parliament’s vote, because had it voted against the measures, the choice for the European Union would have been dealing with the total collapse of Greece or going back on its word and handing out the money regardless, extending the problem like giving endless supplies of money to a profligate and irresponsible relation.
Showing just how cut off we are from the real worries and actual news, as we concern ourselves instead with dead dogs and Jesmond Mugliett, even the fact that Malta is contributing €78 million to the Greek bailout has escaped the attention of the usual gOnzIpN iNtERneT horde.
I might have missed the comments and the news stories, but I didn’t notice the usual litany of shredded reasoning telling Wenz and Tonio to keep the €78 million to subsidise water and electricity, and that charity begins at home. Somehow, I don’t think it’s because the internet elves understand the consequences of not bailing Greece out.
I think it’s because they haven’t noticed and are still bleating on their Facebook walls about inconsequential matters instead. While they agitate about the dog called Star and 62 parking spaces at the Sliema ferries, the threatened collapse of Greece, with the inevitable consequences for the entire Eurozone, would have swept through the Maltese economy harder and faster than anything we have ever seen.
And when you’ve lost your job, suddenly those parking-spaces don’t seem that important anymore.
11 Comments Comment
Leave a Comment
I spent a week in Malta in May and another week in Malta in June but I never heard a “common” person mention Greece and its problems, which affect the EU and the Euro Zone.
I wonder whether Jean Claude Juncker will be sending Maltese administrators to watch over the austerity programmes, which Greece plans to introduce for its citizens.
Daphne, nothing escapes the “usual gOnzIpN iNtERneT horde.”
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20110623/local/malta-ready-to-contribute-to-new-greece-bailout.372107/comments:4
‘Aid’, ‘rescue’, ‘bailout’ – funny euphemisms aren’t they? What do you do with a country that’s indebted to a degree of insolvency? You ‘rescue’ it by pushing it deeper in debt. You bleed its taxpayers of more interest payment while forcing them into savage austerity. You even force other states to borrow on its behalf, thereby pushing all countries further into debt.
Malta has pledged half a billion euros towards the permanent debt mechanism. Yes, Gonzi signed a treaty and hardly told us that we’d need to borrow a further €507 million to throw into the bailout zone by 2013.
In 2009 we were €3.95 billion in the red. By 2010 it was €4.25 billion euros . By 2013 it will top €6 billion. What are we going to do about this spiraling debt? Interest payment is bleeding us dry, currently exceeding €200 million a year. Soon we’ll be borrowing from the IMF itself…
It’s a debt-trap. And it did not just happen.
Kev, I’m sorry, I could not find the one in Brussels, but here is some help for those reading Kev’s contributions from the UK. It is getting very depressing.
http://www.nationaldebtline.co.uk/england_wales/debt_advice.php
Ho, ho, ho, you are sooo funny, ciccio.
Perhaps it would interest you to know that this article omits the fact that these $12 billion were the fifth and last tranche of the €110 billion bailout agreed in May 2010 and that a second €110 billion bailout was discussed during the June Council meeting, to be continued later this month and probably concluded in September. And Ireland might need a second one too… then there’s Spain…
Make us laugh, ciccio.
Kev, They are busy at De La Rue, printing batches of Euro 110 billion…
How fortunate you chose to work for a rag with no reader comment function, because I’m convinced that this has the same chance as a snowball in hell of being posted on your site.
So, the blogfrau has finally woken up to our continents tip-of-the-iceberg problem – the telling-off she so liberally slapped the island with for not being au courant with what has been playing out for close to a year now, notwithstanding.
[Daphne – Look, James Tyrrell aka Beowulf/K P Smith/and now Du da, being a woman might make me stupid by definition in your book, but you should be able to work out that even a dumb woman like me can match up IP numbers, even if I’m not professionally sharp enough to match up writing style, choice of uniquely unpleasant British (make that Northern Irish) self-expression and personal animosity, which incidentally, I am. Whatever your problem is, do please make sure that you carry on dealing with it this way, by posting comments on the internet instead of going out to rape and batter some unsuspecting woman, which is the natural progression with your sort of sentiments and instincts. As for the rest of your comment, it’s the sort of tripe you used to have published in the letters section of The Times (before the online version became your idea of paradise) during the EU referendum campaign: interfering British man from northern Ireland, with a serious case of sexual inadequacy and severe misogyny problems, tells Malta to vote No. Clearly, you need a fresh supply of snuff movies there in County Atrim – or is it Gozo today? – because you’re bored again.]
It’s strange how the reason for her weekly column seems to be to apportion dunce hats to the island with the same gusto as a traffic warden giving out tickets on his first day at work.s to weather she really understands the problem herself , was not wholly clear from the article, even though her position was crystal – but as see-through and fragile as glass.
Is she familiar with the term ‘odious debt’?
A few areas that were not touched on – and with good reason I’d imagine :
how does a country which is already up to it’s neck in un-payable debt, hope to service a now, greatly larger sum? Not with Feta cheese and olives, I can assure you. Never, would be more like it.
Is this a Greek bailout; or a European Banks/Bondholder/ CDS underwriter bailout, and if so, should the Greeks WANT to be forced in to debt peonage for someone else’s losses. Would you?
What happened to the idea of ‘Free markets’, when debt instruments and equities reflected the amount of risk associated with them, and investors took their losses along with their profits. You should know the cliche for our era by now; private profit, public losses.
If there’s one thing that we fail to realise at our own peril it’s that by continuing on this path is just perpetuating the same, systemically-flawed ideas by the same people who steered us here to begin with. And to make things worse, to a much higher and more dangerous degree. Shouldn’t that at least make you think what bailing out Greece means if we then stop to consider the other countries that will be lining up to deny (again) needing more funds.. until they do?
There are two reasons why Greece has been jack-booted in to coughing up (in oh so many ways), and they are CDSs -(credit default swaps), a financial euphemism for what is nothing more than an insurance policy (derivative) which is akin to buying fire insurance on your neighbours house – as many policies as you like (and by the nature of the investment, gives you a strong desire to see that house burn down). And Shorts, or the ability to borrow financial instruments from brokers and selling them in to the market en mass to influence price discovery, usually downward (even though this was not their initial function).
What this means is that the investment bankers who underwrote and sold these instruments have more than a vested interest in seeing Greece not default (Greece had no say in it) simply because the underwriters can’t pay out on the losses. And the other side of the bet are the whales who wish to see Greece do just that, and fail.
In the past it was: bulls and bears make money – pigs get slaughtered. They clearly hadn’t met the sacrificial lamb yet.
What makes this episode in history so sad is the fact that the country is being made a scapegoat in what is little more than a game of poker between vested financial interests who are rewriting the rules as they go along, stumbling from one self-made disaster to another.
Here’s who is at the table: IMF/ECB (yikes), CDS/investment bank/underwriters (double yikes), EU countries/commercial banks holding Greek bonds, hedge fund investment companies trying to make a killing, one way or the other. It may as well read :
Dealer – ‘bottom-card Billy’ , on the small blind; Joe ‘two fingers’, Fred the ‘ long fraud’ on the big ….and the ECB all-in on a busted flush. Sad.
Does it even matter that the decision to resort to this action goes against the same mandate that EU leaders -especially Germany- set out as a prerequisite for the launch of the currency?
To me, only one question is important: was it planned to happen this way (why wait for a crisis when we can create one) or was it just one miserable ‘cock-up’ that the Euro team sleepwalked into? Either way….would you trust them with your money?
They should take the Icelandic-middle finger approach. They seem to be doing quite well.
Iceland? Here in Lilliput they still think that what happened in Iceland related to their not being EU members.
Don’t waste your pearls here, Du da. Time is precious. Just throw them a few bones once in a while and watch them trying to tear your face with it.
[Daphne – Don’t bother being false, Husband of Sharon. Du Da is James Tyrrell, your old friend in opposition to EU membership, along with Nigel Farage. I rather suspect he’s got a lot worse than Sharon’s cow suit in his cupboard.]
Maybe the reason why the usual ‘binary’ comments -by the usual suspects- were, somehow, missing was that the news was not shown on Super One. Or was it? I don’t watch that kind of thing.
Hmm. Never lived or been to any part of Ireland, but I can see how you arrived at that conclusion.
James who?? Beowulf?? Du da and K.P.Smith (my real name and Maltese) very much me, along with serfsdown – which you also failed to post.
Misogyny ? I don’t think I’d better tell you just how much I LOVE woman. Check YOUR articles. Maybe I’m just falling out of love with your writing. Has that ever crossed your mind.
Bored?…most probably.
Do you think I didn’t know you’d match up I.P numbers? I do read your blogs – but with the same cringe factor I’d reserve for Eastenders.
[Daphne – See a psychiatrist, Mr Tyrrell. I mean it. You’ve got a bad problem there. It’s not normal or sane for a British man of around 60 who lives in some obscure part of Northern Ireland to become neurotically and negatively fixated on a columnist in Malta and to stalk her all over the internet. If you knew I would match the IP numbers then you wouldn’t have bothered using different names. If I didn’t know you were born in the 1950s I would assume from your love-hate stalking fixation that you were 15 and afflicted with acne. The difference between 15-year-old boys and 60-year-old men is that the latter are dangerous and this behaviour indicates madness not hormonal puberty.]
It’s the marching season in Northern Ireland so Tyrrell must be hankering after his RUC days.