IMF Not Finished Screwing with the Greek People

From the "You play ball with me and I'll stick the bat up your... " file. The International Monetary Fund, having brought Greek's Syrzia government to bended knee, has figured out there's more fun to be had before the Greek people are adequately punished, broken if you will.


...the International Monetary Fund, one of the lenders that forced Greece to adopt controversial new cuts over the summer in exchange for emergency loans, is rejecting the agreement and insisting instead that the burden of those cuts fall on ordinary Greeks.

The IMF has indicated it will resist the Greek government’s plans to achieve required pension savings partly through an increase in employer contributions, according to a source close to negotiations between the Greek government and official creditors. Instead, the source said, the IMF believes pension savings targets can only be reached through pension cuts of 15 percent, on average.

The IMF's intransigence is reportedly driven by the Fund’s European director, Poul Thomsen, who has long had a tense relationship with the Greek government. Thomsen is a close ally of Wolfgang Schaüble, Germany's hard-line minister of finance.

“That Thomsen is playing a not-so-constructive role is the least one can say,” the source told The WorldPost. “This position of the IMF is puzzling, and they clearly want to either leave the program or blow the whole thing up.”

Peter Doyle, a former senior manager at the IMF, who worked with Thomsen for many years before resigning from the Fund in protest over its management of the Greek debt crisis in 2012, believes that Thomsen “does not care” that there is no evidence his approach will work. Doyle notes that the pension cuts and labor market reforms already enacted have not prompted Greeks to remain working and thereby expand the economy.

“It is just an article of faith. It comes from his whole career in the Fund,” Doyle said. “His entire career has been spent working in Eastern Europe -- Romania, et cetera -- and most of the politicians there are genuinely corrupt. He gets to Greece and thinks it is just like Romania or other less developed European countries.”