Georgios Papakonstantinou, former Greek Minister of Finance (2009-2011), returns to the balance sheet of the twenty years of the euro zone.
Le Monde
For years, Georgios Papakonstantinou needed bodyguards to get around Greece. The former technocrat, which has long worked at the OECD, found itself propelled in one of the worst economic crises by becoming Minister of Finance from Greece between 2009 and 2011. It was he who revealed that the deficit Budgetary from his country had been made up in October 2009. He still had to negotiate the first of the three rescue plans of Greece, of 110 billion euros, to avoid the bankruptcy of his country. The conditions imposed by the donors – the International Monetary Fund and the European Union -, with a very hard austerity, earned him the rancor of the Greeks.
Twenty years after the launch of the euro as fiduciary money – the tickets and coins were put into circulation the 1 January 2002 -, the one who is now a professor at the Institute European academic takes stock of the single currency.
Twenty years after the launch of euro tickets and parts, what assessment do you take?
It is a success, in the sense that we use the euro more and more and where its existence is not questioned. But the crisis of the single currency (2010-2015) highlighted its construction defects. The economists had talked about it during his creation but we pretended so far to ignore them.
When you reveal that the Greek deficit is more important than announced in the statistics, you expect to trigger to trigger a major crisis?
Absolutely not. We thought we were going to have an adjustment of only a few years. It was not understood that the tax crisis hid a deep crisis from Greek institutions.
Has the reaction of the rest of the European Union not aggravated the crisis?
There were structural problems in Greece and a recession was inevitable. But we were very frustrated to see that the donors did not leave us the time to straighten the country and that they did not want to see the responsibility of the euro zone. The structural adjustment program could have been spread over a longer period, to reduce austerity. Our debt could have been restructured more quickly, to reduce the cost.
During the first six months of the crisis, Europe saw that only like a Greek problem, not like a problem of the euro zone. The Germans refused to say that they would not let us go bankrupt when he would have, on the contrary, had to leave the “bazooka” by guaranteeing that there would be no exit from the euro zone, in order to stop contagion of the crisis. Lower wages and pensions in Greece was not enough …
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