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Friday, May 6, 2011

Toxic aid on the European bill of fare Eric Toussaint  http://www.cadtm.org/ToxicAid-On-the-European-Bill-of

In short, in the years following 2013 private creditors must expect a restructuring of the debts of debtor countries, which means a reduction of their amounts after imposed negotiations. But we are not too concerned about the dividends of major shareholders in creditor private institutions: meanwhile, creditors will have received considerable amounts while reducing their exposure to countries at risk, because the IMF, the ECB and the European Commission are taking over. Patrick Artus, chief economist at Natixis, has the same analysis: At the beginning of the coming decade virtually all the debt owed to private creditors will have been repaid while virtually all the public debt owed by countries at risk will be to public creditors (European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), European Union, IMF...) (Flash Economie, 24 March 2011, http://gesd.free.fr/flas1218.pdf  , our translation).

This actually recalls the management of the debt crisis in developing countries in the 1980s with the Brady Plan.[4] Indeed at the beginning of the 1982 crisis the IMF and the governments of the United States, the UK, and other major powers bailed out private bankers in the North that had taken huge risks when lending without restraint to countries of the South, particularly in Latin America (in a somewhat similar way to what happened with subprime mortgages or with countries such as Greece, Eastern European countries, Ireland, Portugal, Spain).When developing countries, starting with Mexico, were on the brink of defaulting,

the IMF and member countries of the Paris Club granted them loans on condition that they carry out repaying private banks and that they implement austerity plans (the notorious Structural Adjustment Policies). Next, as the South was getting more and more into debt through a snowball effect, they set up the Brady Plan (Brady was the US Treasury Secretary at the time) that involved restructuring the debt of major indebted countries through an exchange of securities. In some cases the amount of the debt was reduced by 30% and the new securities (Brady bonds) guaranteed a fixed interest rate of about 6%, which was quite favourable to bankers. This also insured that the same austerity policies would be carried out under control of the IMF and the WB. Today, under different latitudes, the same logic results in the same disasters.

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