Friday, May 07, 2010

It's All Greek To Me

I am woefully economy-challenged and so I don't really understand what's happening but here is one succinct explanationec:

Greece's debt crisis is of its own making, the result of corruption and tax avoidance and that seductive Mediterranean coupling of high living and low productivity. Greece now finds itself in a trap where the only way it can refinance its crushing debt load is to drastically cut spending and raise taxes, but doing so will almost certainly plunge the economy into such a deep recession that incomes and tax revenues will fall and the government will be unable to meet its debt service requirements. So deep is this trap that numerous experts in international finance, including Barry Eichengreen of the University of California at Berkeley, now predict that Greece will eventually default on its debt and force creditors to accept less than they are owed.

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