Scenarios about a possible Greek default were elaborated by rating agencies and analysts three months before the memorandum, according to Tuesday's edition of TA NEA newspaper, which in cooperation with WikiLeaks is continuing to publish the confidential (and controversial) emails by Stratfor, or the US intelligence company known as the "shadow" CIA. According to the report, analysts said in January 2010 that Greece was being used as a "guinea pig" to give a clear message to unruly southern nations.
According to the newspaper "TA NEA", the Troika knew the first bailout package would not solve Greek debt crisis, but went ahead with it anyway in order to use Greece as a "guinea pig" to give a clear message to other unruly southern countries. Indeed, when on January 12, 2010 the European Commission began to criticize Greece's statistics as being "unreliable" which fired up the spreads, an analyst from Stratfor noted that characterizing Greek statistics as being "nonsense" is a very cheap way to lower the price of bonds and push for reforms in Greece.
The main focus of this particular email was whether or not the Greek crisis would effect other EU countries that were also experiencing fiscal problems. At the end of January 2010, another Stratfor analyst spoke in favor of Greece, advocating for its rescue, noting that if the crisis continued then it would spread to Portugal as well as to other stronger economies. However, the same analyst also said that Europe might possibly allow Greece to go bankrupt, when referring to information from his Greek informant.
A few days later, another analyst at Stratfor began emailing Lisa Hindis, an analyst from the ratings agency Moody's, to discuss capital markets. The Moody's analyst said that it was important to find out who was holding Greek bonds apart from the Greece's banks. Hindis told the Stratfor analyst that she suspected that German and Austrian banks (with the exception of Deutsche Bank) had purchased Greek, Irish and Portuguese bonds. The Stratfor analyst agreed.
When the Stratfor analyst asked her if JP Morgan could buy Greek debt and use it as collateral to the European Central Bank (ECB), she responded positively but then said that BNP or JP Morgan would find it "too small" and might not think it would be worth it.
Concluding their discussion, both analysts from Stratfor and Moody's said that most of the Greek debt is held by Greece's banks and because of this they could already be characterized as being bankrupt. Specifically the article in TA NEA quoted them as saying that roughly 99 percent of the debt is owned by Greeks "which makes it easier to allow Greece to explode." The analysts also underlined that Greeks apparently lied about their statistics and cannot set their accounts in order and now therefore owe to themselves. "Why should Greece be saved? concluded the email.
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