During an official visit to the LSE in November 2008, the Queen asked a professor why economists had failed to predict the financial crash, the most dramatic event in recent economic history. The professor's answer is not known. A year later, after a British Academy seminar, eminent economists answered by blaming "a failure of the collective imagination of many bright people, both in this country and internationally, to understand the risks to the system as a whole".Yesterday the IMF reported that the Greek economy had "taken a turn for the worse" against its earlier predictions. The growth forecast for 2011 was revised downwards from -4% to -6% for 2011 and to -3% for 2012. The 2011 deficit, predicted at 7.5% of GDP, has now been revised to 9%. Greek officials expect it to be more than 10%. Public debt was 130% of GDP in 2009. The IMF predicts now that it would peak at 187% in 2013 and fall to 152% of GDP by 2020, if all measures imposed on Greece succeed. This is unlikely. The selling off of the remaining public assets has yielded very little and negotiations with private creditors who were asked to accept a 50% writedown by the EU October summit have stalled. It will take 10 years, the IMF reports, for Greece to close the competitiveness gap. It will take much shorter to destroy the Greece we know.
ανελλαδική Συνάντηση του Μετώπου Αλληλεγγύης και Ανατροπής.
