Greece Will Still Default

There was an article published by Jim Jubak a while ago, which went into the relationships between the European countries. Not to rip his work outright, but the part I’m going to mention was itself borrowed by Jim (openly and admittedly) so I don’t feel bad about writing out the thoughts, without quoting him verbatim or linking to his column on MSN (I don’t have time to track it down).

There was a study Mr. Jubak had quoted, which went into the defaults of sovereign nations such as Argentina in 2002 and Russia in 1998, looking for common conditions that lead to a country to willfully default on their obligations.

What this study found was not, as you would expect, that default is caused by a country which is facing economic catastrophe and huge budget deficits.

During the period which budget deficits persist, the country actually continued to make obligations meet, mostly through further borrowing, austerity, and (if applicable) money printing.

The point at which these countries defaulted was actually when they had a budget surplus.

The suggested reason for this anomaly is that, when confronted with a surplus which is mostly being eaten up in the form of interest payments, and especially when those interest payments are not sufficient to make noticeable impacts on the debt principle, a populous and its elected officials can get a little indignant, forgetting all the money that they borrowed, and begin to become more focused on the amount of time it will take them to pay off all that they owe.

They start thinking that everything would be fine if it weren’t for the debt. After all, they’d have all this money left over, right? It’s the creditor’s fault that they aren’t living prosperously…

Greece will still default. The aid they received is probably not sufficient to thoroughly fix the problem. This is not a true bailout, in the sense that Greece is not any better off.

If the EU had really bailed out Greece the last time, ask yourself, would we be here again inside of 5 months? And since this bailout is itself pretty similar to the last one, do you think the bailout now is going to fix the problem.

Germany has no incentive to destroy their own currency to save Greece. Or Italy. Or Spain. They are not interested in the world blaming them for being hard workers. The national pride has been injured, and if their current officials do not bow to that, then their entire government will be restructured, abruptly and violently, much like what happened here in the U.S. in the 2008 elections, and then again in 2010.

German politicians have to be savvy enough to realize that they’re in hot water, if they don’t stop putting the German citizenry on the line for ingrates.

No, this is most likely simply a delay so that the parties can get their ducks in a row. I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had let Greece default now, since Germany seems to be working behind the scenes to set up this very outcome. However, it would seem they were not ready yet to handle the fallout.

So the ball is punted.

But sometime soon, both Germany and Greece will want a default. Nay, they will insist on it. There’s a reason default is the de facto maneuver in contract law. It is the cleanest, and easiest, and leaves all parties very much aware of where things stand.

A default appeases the German people and gets them off the hook for Greece. A default, after the Greeks get their economy self-contained, gets them relief and a future.

The only question here is: how much time do the main players need to set up the field?

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