Jeremy Beckwith: What's happening with the Greek economy? Not very much. It's sort of stabilised. It's barely growing. The interesting thing has been the Greek election which took place earlier in the year. Syriza won with a mandate to end austerity and also renegotiate the debt with the rest of Europe. Those two objectives are mutually incompatible, certainly as far as rest of Europe are concerned or they don't seem to be as far as Greece is concerned.
And there has been a lot of bad will on both sides. Both sides have been trying to talk to each other, but the Greeks have been really worried about the Germans and the Germans have been quite worried about the Greeks, and it doesn't seem that they are ready – the negotiations are not going particularly well.
Right now Greece is in a quite a tricky situation because essentially they can't print their own money and they are running out of it, and they've got to pay their pensioners, they've got to pay the Greek government workers and they've got to make repayments to the IMF and the E.U.
Now for the most part they are fairly close to – they are essentially fairly close to being bankrupt at any moment. It could easily mean they can't make a payment to somebody and they have to choose who not to pay. As a left-wing government, they are finding it very hard not to pay their own people in Greece, but if renege on a payment to E.U. or the IMF, then that's a default and has international consequences.
So we're going to have a series of crisis I think for next two or three months. As they desperately try to scrabble around to find money, but when it gets to the summer, there are some very large repayments due to the IMF that they are very unlikely to be able to make to find the money for. And so we need a full scale renegotiation of the Greek debt situation by the end of June and that's what it was sort of working to, and in the way of E.U., you pretty won't get a resolution of that until the very last moment.
So I predict more crisis to come over the next three months and then either a big crisis when Greece can't make its repayments, or some sort of agreement by the end of June.
