Greece faces risk of spiralling into default
By Ralph Atkins in Frankfurt and Kerin Hope in Athens
Published: April 22 2010 03:00 | Last updated: April 22 2010 03:00
An emergency rescue package for Athens, which few would have dreamt possible just months ago, moved closer to being activated yesterday, as European and International Monetary Fund officials started combing through Greece's troubled finances.
But will a planned €45bn ($60bn, £39bn) package be enough to end the country's plight? International policymakers must shore up confidence in Greece's public finances and long-term growth prospects if they are to prevent the country falling into a downward spiral leading ultimately to a default that would damage the 16 countries that share the euro currency.
The emergency aid lined up so far should help - but perhaps temporarily.
"I hope that I am wrong but I fear that by the end of the year, they will find out that Greece needs a lot more money for 2011 and 2012 and that we will have serious problems getting another package through," said Thomas Mayer, chief economist at Deutsche Bank.
Greece's challenge is to prevent its debt burden as a share of gross domestic product soaring out of control and the country, in effect, becoming insolvent.
Just what level of debt is sustainable is unclear: Japan has a public sector debt approaching 200 per cent of GDP.
Greece's ratio was 115 per cent last year but internal IMF projections suggest it could rise to 150 per cent by 2014 - and the country could be caught in a vicious circle: an ever higher risk premium demanded by investors is escalating Greece's debt servicing costs, only worsening the outlook for its public finances.
Breaking that cycle would be the aim of the emergency aid programme, details of which were being thrashed out by IMF and European Union officials in Athens yesterday.
All sides were keen that it should work. A Greek default would be "highly likely to lead to grave economic consequences for other countries of the monetary union", Axel Weber, Germany's Bundesbank president, warned on Tuesday.
For Greece, the costs of a default or even exiting the eurozone would be "immensely larger" than the adjustments that will be faced in any case by Greek society, Lorenzo Bini Smaghi, a European Central Bank executive board member, said last week.
The alternative of debt rescheduling might prove scarcely less disruptive - especially if it was seen as just the first step to a default. The €30bn pledged by eurozone governments for the first year of a three-year programme, plus an expected €15bn from the IMF, should be enough to stave off crisis. Of Greece's €53bn funding requirements this year, some €23bn has already been raised since January on international capital markets.
The danger, however, is that the crunch has merely been postponed. Greece badly needs to see its economy growing - so its public finances can be put back on a sustainable basis. But the spending cuts and tax rises demanded as a condition for outside help are having the opposite effect. Athens expects GDP to contract 2 per cent this year. Private sector economists said the fall could be 4 per cent or more.
As such, the fiscal squeeze envisaged could simply prove too ambitious. Overall, Athens is meant to reduce its public sector deficit from more than 13 per cent last year -final figures have not yet been published - to under 3 per cent in 2012.
Similar, double-digit fiscal adjustments have been pushed through in other European countries - for instance in Sweden in the mid-1990s. But Greece's past performance has undermined confidence in its ability to implement structural economic reforms and its modest manufacturing sector limits the scope for export-led growth: there is only so much olive oil it can sell to the world.
If Greece continues on a downward spiral, fresh international help might be required. Its financing needs for next year and 2012 should be below this year's record level but, at €43.6bn in 2011 and €38.1bn in 2012, will still be demanding.
Athens has suggested that a total of €80bn might have to be found. Yet any additional funds might be seen as sending good money after bad.
"Some countries, especially Germany, may say 'enough is enough'," warned Daniel Gros, director of the Brussels-based Centre for European Policy Studies. "Some form of 'default' is now so likely that it is becoming the central scenario."