{"id":5236,"date":"2015-02-03T20:20:27","date_gmt":"2015-02-04T01:20:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=5236"},"modified":"2015-02-03T20:20:48","modified_gmt":"2015-02-04T01:20:48","slug":"5236","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=5236","title":{"rendered":"Greece and the EU \u2013 Nothing But Political Theater?"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3 class=\"art-postheader\"><a title=\"Permanent Link to Greece and the EU \u2013 Nothing But Political Theater?\" href=\"http:\/\/www.acting-man.com\/?p=35599\" rel=\"bookmark\">Greece and the EU \u2013 Nothing But Political Theater?<\/a><\/h3>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Varoufakis\u2019 Tour of Europe<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Greece\u2019s new finance minister Yanis Varoufakis has toured Europe, trying to drum up support for \u2013 actually, we\u2019re not quite sure what for exactly, as the precise nature of the Greek government\u2019s demands is currently in flux (this is a parallel to Syriza\u2019s ever-changing pre-election statements). Essentially, he seems to be gauging what they can get away with.<\/p>\n<p>Not surprisingly, France\u2019s political leadership has announced its\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2015\/02\/02\/business\/international\/france-offers-support-but-no-debt-relief-to-greece.html?_r=0\">support for a \u201cdebt deal\u201d in principle<\/a>(whatever that means), as the spendthrift French government is so to speak an ideological partner-in-crime of Syriza. However, the French government stopped short of supporting a partial write-down of Greece\u2019s debt (Michel Sapin: \u201c<em>No we will not annul, we can discuss, we can delay, we can reduce its weight, but not annul<\/em>\u201d). Similar noises have issued from Berlin and Madrid.<\/p>\n<p>We have argued all along that no EU government can afford to accept such a write-down, as then the guarantees issued for Greek debt would come due and the losses would become \u201creal\u201d \u2013 and appear on everybody else\u2019s budget. We imagine that every EU leader Mr. Varoufakis has spoken to so far has impressed the political necessity of \u201cextend and pretend\u201d on him in no uncertain terms; details may well be up for debate though.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Greece and the EU \u2013 Nothing But Political Theater? &nbsp; Varoufakis\u2019 Tour of Europe Greece\u2019s new finance minister Yanis Varoufakis has toured Europe, trying to drum up support for \u2013 actually, we\u2019re not quite sure what for exactly, as the precise nature of the Greek government\u2019s demands is currently in flux (this is a parallel [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,5],"tags":[2467,279,2246,284,285,1167,2236,3138],"class_list":["post-5236","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-geopolitics","tag-emu","tag-eu","tag-european-monetary-union","tag-european-union","tag-eurozone","tag-greece","tag-syriza","tag-varoufakis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5236","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5236"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5236\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5238,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5236\/revisions\/5238"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}