The game is dirty and has lasted 70 years. It came with the idea of development as imitating, but not catching up, with the West, for all states, including the deluge of states due to decolonization.
The formula for big profit is simple: give credit to a country poor enough not to be able to pay it off quickly, yet not so poor that it cannot go on servicing the loan for years.
By Johan Galtung
Via TFF PressInfo – Lund, Sweden
To be worthwhile the project must be capital-intensive, like (air)ports and highways to the (air)ports for import-export, assembling cars–something for the rich.
Investment to lift up people in misery, or ravished nature, makes no sense: the poor need very little capital and can only pay back in labor, whereas nature pays back but is not capitalized.
Ideally, the country asks for more credit to service the first, and a second, third loan is then offered at higher interest.
Till the debt is non-sustainable; the debtor country is then squeezed dry.
Then comes the time for debt relief, provided the profit made on investment in debt exceeds the debt forgiven.
From Agence France Presse comes a study: Germany made € 100 billion on the Greek crisis since 2010 – amounting to 3% of the GDP – on the difference between interests paid to German banks and the interest they paid; from German banks to ECB 1%, to German banks from debtors, say, 6%.
Germany’s share of the total bailout package to Greece – with the latest for payment due August 20 – is € 90 billion, meaning a € 10 billion profit if Greece cannot be squeezed further.
The money flowing into Greece is to keep banks, not people, afloat.
And to benefit USA, France and the Netherlands, but to a lesser extent than Germany.
This is the way the Third World has been treated by the USA-based IMF and the World Bank; what is new is EU treating a fellow EU member like a Third World country (or worse).
Next in line is Ukraine…
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