Posted on 05/24/2015 3:55:41 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Greece cannot make an upcoming payment to the International Monetary Fund on June 5 unless foreign lenders disburse more aid, a senior ruling party lawmaker said on Wednesday, the latest warning from Athens it is on the verge of default.
Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras's leftist government says it hopes to reach a cash-for-reforms deal in days, although European Union and IMF lenders are more pessimistic and say talks are moving too slowly for that.
Greek officials now point to a race against the clock to clinch a deal before payments totaling about 1.5 billion euros ($1.7 billion) to the IMF come due next month, starting with a 300 million euro payment on June 5.
"Now is the moment that negotiations are coming to a head. Now is the moment of truth, on June 5," Nikos Filis, spokesman for the ruling Syriza party's lawmakers, told ANT1 television.
"If there is no deal by then that will address the current funding problem, they won't get any money," he said.
Talks between Greece and its lenders have foundered on Athens' demand to roll back labour and pension reform as well as lower fiscal targets set under its bailout programme.
Among concessions Athens is mulling is a special tax on banking transactions to help raise revenue to meet fiscal targets, though discussion of the levy is at an early stage, two sources close to the talks said.
If the talks collapse, Tsipras's government has made clear it will pay pensioners and public workers before servicing debt.
(Excerpt) Read more at ekathimerini.com ...
this could be the first domino.
Why would anyone lend a broke and irresponsible entity or person money?
Wish I could do that with my mortgage holder.
My understanding is they never should have been permitted to join the Euro-zone, that they got in via deception (and possibly winking at that deception by others) and they should get out ASAP.
If Fort Knox ain’t dry yet, it will be.
Even a little socialism is enough to drag a country down.
so they need to borrow money from the IMF to pay the IMF?
Fiscal Conservatism doesn’t cost a thing. Socialism costs everything.
well we’ve realized that here
Why would anyone lend a broke and irresponsible entity or person money?
Because someone is profiting from it?
Anyone who, whether through stupidity or a desire to wield control over another country, lent money to the Greek state deserves to be repaid in new drachma, or not at all, perhaps especially the ECB and IMF, which (in the remarkably cogent description of the current Greek prime minister — one of the few times I have ever read a sound economic analysis originating on the left) treated an insolvency crisis as if it were an illiquidity crisis, the last time around, and gave more loans to the already bankrupt Greek state, not to help either the Greek people or the Greek state, but as a way of shielding private banking interests from their exposure to bad Greek debt.
How many times is this that Greece said it would default? This is getting to be like the little boy who cried, “Wolf!”
Private profits, socialized losses. The longer the ECB and IMF play this game, the less exposure the banksters have to losses on Greek debt.
Like borrowing from one credit card to pay the other credit card.
“My understanding is they never should have been permitted to join the Euro-zone, that they got in via deception (and possibly winking at that deception by others) and they should get out ASAP.”
In general, from the inception of the EU the first members feared later entry of mostly poor, southern states like Greece, etc.
The fear was coming out on the losing side, of income redistribution. The relatively strong founding nations in 1957 were West Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, Nederland and Luxemburg.
Obviously their fears were justified. And it plays out now.
Another big issue today is movement of people, namely muslim terrorists.
The name of the game is bailout. The banking cartel will arrange the bailout in a way that banking losses will be shifted to the taxpayers.
I thought socialism worked?
Utopia!
It’s the severe aging and depopulation, combined with heavy unemployment, that is doing Greece in.
Bingo! They want to pay a debt through more borrowing? Nonsense. Why don’t they just print the money, that is what the “federal” “reserve” does.”
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