Before Syriza lost its nerve, there was a good chance that a unilateral Grexit would have lessened the economic turmoil in Greece. But in circumstances that have yet to be explained, the Greeks caved in.
After his return from the EU Wroclaw Summit of September 2011, US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is reported to have said “Those bastards in the EC, they are going to beat Greece to a pulp with a f**king baseball bat”.
In late 2014, the Telegraph's Ambrose Evans-Pritchard reported a confirmation of the story after reading Geithner’s memoirs. Tim was quoted as follows:
“…..the Europeans came into that meeting basically saying: ‘We’re going to teach the Greeks a lesson. They are really terrible. They lied to us. They suck and they were profligate and took advantage of the whole basic thing and we’re going to crush them.”
AEP’s comment in the Telegraph piece went like this:
‘So now we know: Europe’s leaders did indeed attempt to smash Greece back into the Stone Age out of vindictive rage; conspired to withhold debt support for Italy unless the elected leader was forced out; and mismanaged the EMU crisis for three years with a level of stupidity that makes you want to weep.’
It leads me to believe that if there is no Brexit, Britain will suffer similar punishment from an unelected hierarchy of Goldman Sachs alumni.
But this is not my main reason for wanting to leave. The EU financially is a house of cards. Quantative Easing has become the norm (as in the US and UK) in a desperate attempt to prop up economies with no production. Greece has been raped and all of its profit centres privatised. Italy has an enormous hole in its banking system, Portugal also. Spain has a similar problem compounded with severe political instability. In France, a well known bank whose initials coincide with a British right wing political group (French privacy laws make naming names very dangerous)
are broke. No other word for it, held together with baling twine.
And last October, Reuters said:
“ Deutsche Bank has $1.5 trillion of declared asset value on top of $67 billion of net worth. But a large portion of its assets are loans and related financing vehicles and trading positions connected to Glencore, VW, the energy sector, emerging market companies, high yield and a highly unreliably valued net derivatives position. If Deutsche Bank has “mismarked” the value of all these assets by just 5% its net worth is wiped out. “
The EU has never been audited, its banks and banking systems are a busted flush (UK included) and when, not if, the first bank collapses the whole edifice comes down with it. So, now that we are all bank creditors, not clients; who fancies being on the wrong end of a Eurobank Bail In?