Algunos artefactos que genera RUP

I have already discussed the initial concerns of the IMF as to the unsustainability of Greek Government debt, which served as a constraint for the granting of Fund resources, under its Guidelines on Condition-ality. Nevertheless, Greece was given a 30-billion-euro loan for all the reasons mentioned in the previous section, but also following a report by the IMF Board that predicted levels of expected growth and budget surpluses as a result of the Fund's loan. So, the idea was that Greece may carry an unsustainable debt at the time, but will eventually become sustainable through the program, based on predictions of future growth and surpluses.

Unfortunately, in the summer of 2011 the projections of the IMF were discharged as growth levels did not even resemble those predicted a year earlier. This is summoned up in an IMF Internal Audit Report of 2016 ("Greece-Preliminary debt sustainability analysis- updated estimates and further considerations"),

that discusses the input of erroneous data so as to reach equally false projections of future growth and surpluses. The thing is that this was not a typical case of "coming up short", but there are signicant legal implications. It is common knowledge that after a while, Fund members were subjected to severe pressure (by either the United States, the EU whose members' combined voting rights within the IMF reach 32%, or someone else) in order to participate in the rescue programmes. I wouldn't go so far as to say that there was foul play or that the numbers were cooked intentionally, but in any case, the IMF, strictly legally speaking, violated its own rule, that is to abstain from engaging in a loan agreement with as state that carries an unsustainable debt. [29].

Chapter 5

Conclusions

I have to admit that as I began my preliminary research, gathering all the relevant material, the variety of topics that eventually would be covered was kind of a blur to me, so I decided to pick up stu that bore signicance along the way. As a result, this paper addresses numerous issues -either at the core or peripheral to the main subjects of sovereign debt and the ECB and IMF framework. So, at some point readers might be urged to demand a greater degree of elaboration that unfortunately cannot be oered for the purposes of this paper.

In any case, I stressed out the general tendency of states -that lack printing privilege- to resort to external funding either in the form of a loan or bond issuance, for reasons that I consider them to be directly linked with politics (i.e. no Government that wants to remain in seat would be thrilled to impose higher taxation). Furthermore, history has shown that accumulating more and more amounts of debt resembles the mechanism of a ticking time bomb, as any Government would be willing to attract the necessary funding, hoping that the consequences will not blow up in its face but in its successor's.

With regard to the Eurozone crisis, however, the setting was dierent as huge gaps in public nances grew from bail-out programmes in favour of the state's banking sector, highlighting the vicious circle of sovereign-banking debt.

As for the arguments in support of the pivotal role of both the ECB and the IMF, it seems clear to me that the euro area was caught o guard when the crisis broke out. So, there was a need to think and act outside the box and "bend" some of the legal boundaries that otherwise would have prohibited the extensive involvement of the two institutions.

Having said that, I believe that the Eurozone has learned from failures of the past. Nowadays, the appropriate tools are in place, in terms of regulation and institutionally, so it can be said that someday people can look back and remember the Troika and the like as a -necessary- boogie man of the distant past.

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