(7/20/2015) Alexis Tsipras, the Greek prime minister, has the chance to play a role for his country analogous to the roles played by Korean President Kim Dae Jung in 1997 and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2002.
Throughout history, big economic and political shocks have often occurred in August, when leaders had gone on vacation in the belief that world affairs were quiet. Examples of geopolitical jolts that came in August include the outbreak of World War I, the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 and the Berlin Wall in 1961. Subsequent examples of economic and other surprises in August have included the Nixon shock of 1971 (when the American president enacted wage-price controls, took the dollar off gold, and imposed trade controls), 1982 eruption in Mexico of the international debt crisis, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the 1991 Soviet coup, 1992 crisis in the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and US subprime mortgage crisis of 2007. Many of these shocks constituted events that had previously not even appeared on most radar screens. They were considered unthinkable.
The members of the eurozone and the EU have apparently decided that they must heroically rescue Greece, that this is better than having the IMF do it. Senior figures in Brussels feel that the latter alternative is unthinkable. I am a little confused about why. Martin Wolf writes in the Financial Times this week that to bring in the Fund “would demonstrate that this is not a true union at all.” But the EU and EMU and not true fiscal unions. If the citizens of Germany and other more successful countries were willing to bail out the Greeks, then fine; the EMU would be ready to be a fiscal union. But they are not; so it is not. Given that reality, what is wrong with something that “demonstrates” it?