It has finally been achieved the agreement to bail out Greece. A year and a half late, Europe has finally done what it should have done well before and with much lower economic and political costs. The Greeks, for their part, have done everything to pollute the waters, making promises that were not then followed up with punctual implementation, refusing to enact those indispensable structural reforms to try to create a more orderly and competitive environment. The result is that investors have become frightened and have begun to fear the contagion of all those countries with high public debt, such as Italy, while Greek citizens have gradually become convinced that their troubles depended more on the wickedness of the creditors, in the first place of the Germans, and from the dissipation of the financial resources available in past years, carried out by their governments with the complicity of the great majority of the population.
The confusion has increased. The credibility of both Greece and all of Europe led by Merkel has been seriously undermined and now everyone is looking with concern not only at the debts of the states, but at the fact that the Old Continent seems to have lost the path to growth. Budget rigor is contrasted with an expansive monetary and fiscal policy without saying who would be willing to finance a further increase in public deficits. The populists blame all the blame on the banks who made a mistake in lending so much money to Greece and therefore now do not deserve to be bailed out, not to mention the fact that private investors have suffered a cut in their credits of about 70%.
UA story in which all the actors have made gross mistakes, which we hope last night's agreement will lead to a rational solution. The Greeks will first have to convince themselves that failure would have entailed far greater sacrifices than this sort of commissioner imposed by Europe. After all, it is normal for an indebted person or company to be subjected to strict supervision by creditors, so that they implement a series of savings and asset transfer actions. Even the States do not shy away from this logic, which can be considered severe and unpleasant but which responds to an iron requirement of those who seek to recover, at least in part, their credits. For the States it is then necessary to launch a series of reforms capable of improving the competitiveness of the system in order to be able to restart the economic machine and resume a path of development.
Believing that the debtor is always innocent and that the sacrifices he is called to make are unjust, as is repeated by many beautiful souls especially on the left, as seen in Lerner's Monday evening broadcast, it is not only wrong, but profoundly harmful and therefore the origin of other and more serious accidents. Has Lerner ever heard of "moral hazard", i.e. the risk that failure to sanction debtors can lead to increasingly risky behavior, thus laying the foundations for ever greater catastrophes?
But the creditors too, and above all the states of the European Community, have made serious mistakes. The now approved Greek debt restructuring operation, with related receivership, could have been carried out several months ago, without however imposing a heavy credit cut on banks and private individuals, but by imposing on Athens those same measures of reorganization of its own expenses and of control over its execution, which have now been imposed. The decision to make private individuals participate in the losses on a state's debt, while correct on a theoretical level, has in practice unleashed the fear of contagion on the markets. Indeed, investors feared that what happened to Greece could be repeated for other weak countries such as Portugal or Italy, thus setting in motion a crisis of confidence that was about to overwhelm the very scaffolding of the Euro. Realizing the mistake, Germany itself together with France, then hastened to clarify that Greece would remain a unique case and that no other eurozone country would fail.
All this has highlighted the weakness of Europe which lacks a real political government capable of carrying out territorial rebalancing actions, through a common fiscal policy, and a monetary policy truly capable of properly managing the entire debt of the Euro countries. Surely Europe is still in midstream. Financial consolidation policies must be accompanied by development policies based not on public spending (as some would like), but on the completion of the single market, on liberalisation, on the efficiency of public administrations. Kind of what Monti, together with Cameron, proposed in Brussels, and that's what our government is trying to do in Italy. These measures, together with low interest rates which will certainly be the result of the stability of public finances, could trigger the long-awaited development of Old Europe.
