STOURNARAS Bank of Greece SCANDAL: An example of the drivel he sponsors

Dixon…recipient of Stournaras bollocks

What a profoundly bent load of old crap the New York Times has become

Yesterday I posted – based on very sound Athens sources – the story that Bank of Greece Governor Yannis Stournaras had been caught red-handed briefing a senior journalist about how to disseminate negative-spin bollocks about Greece’s fiscal and Troika negotiation positions.

Today there have been frantic attempts to play down the story, with Stournaras himself denying it. But the fact remains that finance ministry, Syriza and other well-connected sources all had the same story without collusion: Stournaras’s involvement in spreading mendaciously negative fictions to both Greek National and international media, with the documentation to prove it.

One of the global media outlets I fingered specifically was Reuters. Reuters ‘Journalist’ Hugo Dixon has posted a number of ill-informed and downright spuriously negative stories about Syriza. Yesterday, his column popped up at the New York Times, renowned publisher of desk-bound European stories it usually fails to check. It is, let’s not beat about the bush, a disgracefully biased and almost entirely fictitious account of the Athens Government’s past and current situation.

Some extracts will suffice to illustrate:

‘When Mr. Tsipras took office in January, he seemed to have thought he could extract more cash from his creditors as well as secure relief on Athens’s debts without undertaking serious reforms. This was pie in the sky’.

Varoufakis went out of his way to say that Syriza DID NOT want any further money…just breathing space to restructure and stimulate the economy.

‘The government also didn’t initially factor into its calculations how badly the economy would be damaged by months of political uncertainty and a liquidity crisis. In November, the European Commission was predicting growth of 2.9 percent this year. Last week, it cut that to 0.5 percent, and even that could prove optimistic.’

The bare-faced invention in that paragraph beggars belief. Every single EC forecast for Greece has proven to be utterly wrong and devoid of reality. The idea that two months of Syriza government have substantively changed anything is complete rubbish: worse, it is bending the truth out of any recognisable shape.

‘Given such a gloomy prognosis, it is important to examine alternatives. There are two: default and leave the euro, or default and stay in the single currency.’

I do not know how many more times I need to call out this lie, but for one more time at least: there is no such choice. Greece cannot leave the euro…no mechanism exists. Dixon is an international economics journalist and he doesn’t understand that? Don’t make me laugh.

‘Mr. Tsipras hopes he can persuade his eurozone creditors to lend Greece some cash in the next few weeks to stave off bankruptcy. But that will only be possible if he crosses his own red lines on matters like pensions, labor laws and value-added taxes.’

I mean, really. That is bogstandard Troika/eurogroupe bombast: it could’ve been dictated word for word by Schäuble and Draghi.

There are journalists in this world trying to tell the truth. There are even bankers in this world trying to do the best for their citizens. Dixon and Stournaras are clearly neither: they are whores, peddling the arse-covering, save-our-beloved-euro bilge ad nauseam. And the BoG destabilisation scandal is not going away. The sooner both these spineless Ministers of Truth are jobless the better the world will be.

All that said, Stournaras remains this morning, inexplicably, in his job. Who or what has brought pressure on Syriza to save this traitor’s neck?

Stay tuned.

Last night at The Slog: Drama in the Garden

Filed under: STOURNARAS Bank of Greece SCANDAL: An example of the drivel he sponsors Tagged: Alexis Tsipras, Hugo Dixon Troika whore, New York Times drivel, Yannis Stournaras