EuroZone Profiteers: How German and French Banks Helped Bankrupt Greece
Alexis Tsipras, the prime minister of Greece, has called a national referendum this Sunday
to call the bluff of the European Union and International Monetary Fund
who are trying to force his country to accept severe austerity in
return for effectively rolling over much of the countries’ debt.
Today Greece owes its creditors €323 billion ($366 billion), some 175 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. How did it end up owing so much money?
“We
should be clear: almost none of the huge amount of money loaned to
Greece has actually gone there,” Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist
of the World Bank and a Nobel Prize winner in economics, wrote in the
Guardian newspaper today. “It has gone to pay out private-sector creditors – including German and French banks.”
A recent CorpWatch report - The EuroZone Profiteers
- can help shed further light on this matter. While it’s true that
corrupt Greek politicians borrowed billions for shaky government schemes
from these banks, there was a very good reason that the financiers made
these rash loans: they were under pressure from European Union
bureaucrats to compete in a global marketplace with U.K. and U.S. banks.
