On Friday, European monetary affairs commissioner Joaquin Almunia declared;
“There is no bailout and no "plan-B" for the Greek economy because there is no risk it will default on its debt”.
The good news is that, as we speak, there is a team from Brussels which will start advising Greece on how to fix its finances. The bad news is that they might have to have to start from the very beginning, like with grade-school math.
Apparently Greece got into a bit of disarray all of a sudden when someone noticed a little mistake (presumably arithmetical). It turned out that the projected budget deficit of 3.7% of GDP for 2009, would actually be 12.7%, and they found that out, apparently some time in January 2010.
So while we are on that subject, I was just wondering how Joaquin Almunia is so sure about “plan-A”…I mean did he check the math? And well if there is indeed a “plan-A”, then what are all those armies of EU financial wizards advising about?
Or is “plan-A” that the Germans will just hand over a load of money?
Anyway the EU was not well pleased to hear about the arithmetical mistake, this is what they said:
The European Commission has published a damning report on Greece's "unreliable" economic figures, increasing the chances of the EU executive launching infringement proceedings against Athens. The report on Greek government deficit and debt statistics highlights the general "lack of quality of the Greek fiscal statistics" and "failures of the relevant Greek institutions in a broad sense." [1]
One thing I like to do is figure out chaotic countries that don’t have good statistics and aren’t very good at arithmetic, so thought I’d spend a couple of hours digging around trying to figure out how the Greek economy works.
I can report that statistics (you know those boring things like National Accounts and all that tedious stuff) are evidently not something that comes easy over there.
I say that because you would have thought that with 40% of the population employed in the public sector, they might have been able to come up with a set of National Accounts that you can access on the Internet. Even poor countries like Kenya and India have that sort of information, and Greece is supposed to…
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