Must-Read: Daniel Davies: The shortest Greece post ever
Must-Read: One important question (and answer) are missing from the very sharp Daniel Davies’s latest:
: The shortest Greece post ever: “It has been suggested… that 10000 words about a bailout…
from 5 years ago… was a bit too much. I disagree…. But… this is the Twitter generation, so here is a very, very condensed version of my “Relitigating the 2010 bailout” series: How much primary deficit financing did Greece get from the troika? Roughly, EUR15bn. How much primary deficit financing could Greece have got from anywhere other than the troika?: Roughly, zero. So, how much did Greece benefit from the troika, in terms of smoothing output and consumption?: Roughly, 6% of [annual] GDP over four years. Is that a lot?: Yes, proportionately, it’s about half as big again as what West Germany received under the Marshall Plan.
The missing question and answer is: How much extra did Greece suffer because its attachment to the eurozone prevented its following the depreciation road to structural adjustment?: 15% of annual GDP x 5 years so far = 75% of annual GDP
And there is also: How much does Germany benefit from the export powerhouse role it could not assume if the DM were not in the eurozone?: I leave that as an exercise for the reader.