Greece's Troubles with Debt Go Back to the 1980s When Successive Governments Began Increasing the Size of Government and the Number of Public Employees, Just Like the U.S.

Greek Deal to Cut Spending Does Mot End Debt Drama

Greece agrees to slash spending to put bailout within reach, yet economic pain is not over

February 9, 2012

AP - More than two years after it came clean about its addiction to debt, Greece may finally have begun its long and painful road to recovery.

Greece's fractious political leaders struck a deal Thursday to make deep cuts in government jobs and spending to help save the country from a default that could shock the world financial system.

The deal, under negotiation since July, is one of two critical steps Greece must take to receive a €130 billion ($170 billion) bailout from other countries in Europe and around the globe.

European ministers said the deal needs to go further and gave Greece until the middle of next week to find an extra €325 million ($430 million) in savings, pass the cuts through a divided parliament, and get written guarantees that they will be implemented even after elections set for April. Greece is expected to rush the new austerity measures through parliament by late Sunday.

In addition to the fiscal austerity mandated by the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund, Greece is close to an agreement with private investors who hold nearly two-thirds of its debt to sharply reduce the country's borrowing costs.

Greece needs the bailout by March 20 so it will have enough money to redeem €14.5 billion worth of bonds coming due. If it doesn't make that payment, it will be in default. Financial analysts fear that could set off a chain reaction similar to the financial meltdown triggered by the collapse of investment bank Lehman Brothers in the fall of 2008.

The bailout will ease some of the uncertainty that has unsettled Europe and the world financial system for more than two years, but it will not bring down the curtain on Greece's debt drama.

Greece remains in a deep recession. Unemployment is 20.9 percent after the economy's fifth straight year of decline. Its government finances and its economy are being dragged down by costly political patronage, tax evasion and special protections for some favored trades.

Greece will be struggling to pay its debts for years, says Domenico Lombardi, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

"The scope of the problems that have to be tackled in Greece are so huge and so entrenched," he says.

Efforts to fix those fundamental problems, at the behest of Greece's increasingly exasperated creditors — including prosperous Germany — are moving slowly, if at all. If they are not solved, Greece may find itself back at the edge of default.

The deal Greek political leaders struck Thursday includes a 22 percent cut in the monthly minimum wage to €586 ($780), layoffs for 15,000 civil servants and an end to dozens of job guarantee provisions.

Greece is also close to a vital debt-relief deal with banks, hedge funds, pension funds and other private investors. Under the tentative deal, the private investors would exchange €206 billion in Greek government bonds for €30 billion in cash, plus €70 billion in new bonds. The cash would come from the €130 billion package from Europe and the IMF. The new bonds also would have a lower average interest rate and a longer term of maturity.

The combination of less principal to repay when the bonds mature and less interest to pay every year until then means Greece would spend about 70 percent less than it would have without a deal.

The debt held by the European Central Bank and other public institutions accounts for one-third of Greece's national debt and is not part of this tentative deal. However, ECB President Mario Draghi said Thursday that the bank could distribute to member countries the profits it stands to make on Greek bonds, leaving open the possibility of additional debt relief for Greece.

If Greece were to default, investors would become reluctant to lend to other heavily indebted European countries for fear they would not get their money back, pushing their borrowing costs even higher than they are now.

Those other countries include Italy, which has an economy six times the size of Greece's. Most analysts say Italy is too big to bail out.

The specter of default has hung over world financial markets for more than two years. Whenever there has been progress — and, indeed, U.S. stock indexes have doubled from the lows they reached in March 2009 — Greece has always stood in the way of more.

And while the immediate danger appears to have passed, it is far from clear whether Greece has won enough debt relief to fix its finances for good.

Its economy — ultimately the key to handling debt — remains in a deep recession. It shrank at an annual rate of 5 percent in the third quarter of 2011. Earlier in the year, it was shrinking at an 8.3 percent rate, about as fast as the United States economy was shrinking during the worst of the Great Recession. Thousands of shops and small businesses, vital to the Greek economy, have gone bankrupt. And protesters have taken to the streets of Athens regularly to denounce the government and its austerity measures.

Greece's troubles with debt go back to the 1980s, when successive governments began increasing the size of government and the number of public employees. By 2010, the total had reached 750,000 full-time employees — including 10,000 Greek Orthodox priests and 81,000 military officers — and 150,000 on part-time contracts. That was almost one in five people in the Greek labor force.

Government jobs became a way of rewarding supporters of Greece's two main political parties. The parties made matters worse by raising the wages of government employees to unsustainable levels. At the same time, the government was lax about collecting taxes. It had to issue ever more debt to cover its spiraling wage bills.

At first, bond investors lent freely, at interest rates slightly higher than for economic powerhouse Germany. After all, Greece was one of the 17 countries that use the euro. All had promised to observe strict budget and deficit limits. And while on paper the treaty that created the 27-country European Union forbade bailouts, there was a vague sense that Europe could not let a country go bust.

Then came Oct. 21, 2009. A newly elected government in Athens told its European partners that its finances were far worse than the previous government had disclosed.

The national deficit, the difference between what a government takes in and what it spends, was not 3.7 percent of annual economic output, as had been believed. It was 12.5 percent, and that was later revised higher to 15.4 percent. One condition of being in the eurozone was that countries were required to keep deficits to a manageable level of no more than 3 percent of economic output.

Investors around the world, still reeling from the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the worldwide financial crisis just a year earlier, began looking hard at risk. They demanded higher interest rates to loan Greece money by buying its bonds, and Greece's borrowing costs soared.

On April 27, 2010, ratings agency Standard & Poor's downgraded Greek bonds to junk status — the first time a eurozone country was given a non-investment grade rating.

The next month, other euro countries and the IMF intervened. They promised €110 billion in loans — to be paid out in stages — so that Greece could pay its debts as they came due.

The terms of the bailout were harsh: higher taxes and deep cuts in public spending and wages at least through 2020, a package of fiscal belt-tightening known as austerity. As it took hold, the Greek economy sagged further, and it's expected to remain weak for years.

The second €130 billion bailout package would come as loans plus €30 billion in cash that would go to the private creditors who agree to swap their bonds. Greece would use an additional €40 billion of the bailout money to invest in the country's banks, which stand to take massive losses as part of the debt-relief deal.

Even with the debt relief and the bailout money, it will be difficult for Greece to ensure that its new, lower level of debt is manageable, or that it will be able to sell bonds at favorable interest rates over the next decade. Greece will have to continue borrowing money to repay holders of bonds that mature, as well as to finance budget deficits that will continue, even though they'll be smaller.

"I do not think the plan will work," says Uri Dadush, director of the international economics program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Dadush says Greece needs even more debt relief.

But a responsible budget and sound economic policies are supposed to convince investors that the country will be able to pay its debts, and thus should be able to borrow at affordable rates.

In recent weeks, other countries in the European Union have made progress doing just that. In the final months of last year, countries such as Italy and Spain watched helplessly as yields on their debt spiraled ever higher. Governments fell in Rome and Madrid.

The new governments moved swiftly to cut spending. The result has been an easier time raising money in the bond markets and much lower rates. On Nov. 25, the interest rate on Italy's two-year bonds was 7.40 percent. On Friday, it was 2.96 percent, the lowest since June 2010.

Much of the improvement, though, is credited to the European Central Bank, which announced a program in December designed to help stabilize shaky banks in the eurozone. The ECB said it would loan the banks unlimited amounts of money at 1 percent interest and for three years instead of the normal one. The banks responded by borrowing €489 billion ($632.6 billion). They've used at least some of that money to buy government bonds — extra demand that has helped bring down governments' borrowing costs.

But Greece's problems are so severe it has remained locked out of the bond market.

Greece's outstanding government debt is about €350 billion, an amount equal to more than 160 percent of its annual economic output. The budget reforms and debt-relief deals aim to get that figure down to 120 percent by 2020. The United States has a debt-to-gross domestic product ratio of 100 percent. But because it is seen by investors as one of the safest countries to lend to, its borrowing costs have stayed low.

For Greece, the target of 120 percent is still a relatively high figure. According to the IMF, it is at the limit of what is manageable. And the figure assumes that Greece's economy will meet expectations for economic growth — no sure thing after years of ever deeper recession.

Also in question is whether Greek voters, who will choose a new government in an election tentatively set for April, will put up with eight more years of austerity.

Two future U.S. presidents, Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon, are pictured with Harvey Hancock (standing) and others at Bohemian Grove in the summer of 1967. (Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.)

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