Grekland kan behöva ny bailout

IMF meddelar idag att de vägrar delta i fler stödprogram till Grekland om inte landet kan hitta finansiering för de kommande 12 månaderna. BNP-utvecklingen i Grekland har år efter år varit betydligt sämre än vad Trojkan förutspått, och uppskattningsvis saknar nu Grekland 4,6 BEUR i finansiering det kommande året.

IMF släppte en rapport under förra veckan där de kritiserade Trojkans och sin egen roll under Grek-bailouten 2010. Rapporten hänger ut både EU-kommissionen och ECB, vilket väckte en del frågor kring vad IMF önskar åstadkomma. Det mest extrema scenariot är att IMF vill lämna Trojkan, men då hade valutafonden förmodligen inte deltagit i Cyperns bailout. Sannolikt är att IMF gör en pudel och ber om ursäkt för den överoptimistiska bailouten av Grekland för att visa att saken kommer att skötas annorlunda i framtiden. En eventuell policy-ändring från IMFs sida kommer förmodligen inkludera större initiala nedskrivningar av lån i bailout-länder och bankkunder som får ta en del av smällen, precis som i Cypern-bailouten.



On the IMF’s Big Fat Greek Woulda-Shoulda-Coulda

The IMF report admits to three major failings of the Greek program. First, that Greek sovereign debt wasn’t restructured immediately and a haircut on government bonds held by private investors was delayed until March 2012. This gave investors almost two years to reduce their exposure, dumping it on the official sector instead.

Second, the IMF admitted that the underlying macroeconomic assumptions it used in its debt sustainability analyses were wildly optimistic. As the IMF has previously conceded, it underestimated the fiscal multiplier and therefore the impact of austerity and budget cuts on economic growth. With growth estimates way off, deficit and debt-to-gross domestic product ratios were wrong as well. The much sharper than forecast contraction meant that unemployment also soared beyond the IMF’s expectations. We’ve all seen the results.

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I think we can assume that the next meeting of the troika will be awkward. That may be precisely what the IMF was aiming for -- to provoke the European Commission and ECB into kicking it out of the club. After all, apart from being such a mess, the Greek program is also the largest (relative to the size of the economy) in which the IMF has ever participated. After the IMF’s experience in Argentina, employees are not pleased to be funding another unsustainable debt trap

I’m not sure, though, that the IMF is looking for a way out of the troika. If it were, it could easily have exited during deliberations to bailout Cyprus. It chose to participate.


Another possibility is that the IMF is simply trying to claw back some of the credibility it lost during the Greek bailout. Privately some IMF officials have questioned the sustainability of Greece’s debt burden, both pre- and post-debt restructuring. This report allowed the fund to confess to these uncertainties and push some of the blame onto its troika partners.