John Dizard is a veteran journalist and analyst with a long experience in financial markets. His recent Financial Times article The future of Greek financial negotiations is ancient history (April 17th) looks at Greek debt and Greek foreign relations through history, and notes that much of what we are seeing today has already occurred in the past in very similar dimensions.
Philip Ammerman was quoted by John Dizard in this article:
As my Athenian friend Philip Ammerman wrote to me on Friday, “Greek exports have collapsed largely because of a lack of trade finance or working capital. In the past, Greek banks were typically able to factor or finance exports based on an export order or contract. Moreover, international actors like Euler Hermes, the credit insurer, would more easily grant credit risk insurance to European imports from Greek companies. Right now, both sources of finances are entirely closed off.”
Navigator recently completed a financial restructuring analysis project in Athens for a major HVAC trader which, together with other work, illustrated just how difficult the trade finance situation in Greece has become.
One very cogent point made by this article:
There are many more well-educated, hard-working Greeks with universalistic values. How many of those still live in the Hellenic Republic as taxpaying productive citizens, though, is an open question. After each past crisis, many of the best locals just picked up and left, and the same has been happening this time. The consequent erosion of the talented part of the working age population is just not captured in the statistics gathered by the government and the troi… sorry, the “institutions”. Already the population is declining faster than previous statistical projections.
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