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LESSONS FROM THE IMF’S BAILOUT OF GREECE 

HEARING 

BEFORE THE

SUBCOMMITTEE ON MONETARY 

POLICY AND TRADE 

OF THE

COMMITTEE ON FINANCIAL SERVICES 

U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES 

ONE HUNDRED FIFTEENTH CONGRESS 

FIRST SESSION 

MAY 18, 2017 

Printed for the use of the Committee on Financial Services 

Serial No. 115–20 

( 

(II) 

HOUSE COMMITTEE ON FINANCIAL SERVICES 

JEB HENSARLING, Texas, Chairman 

PATRICK T. MCHENRY, North Carolina, 

Vice Chairman 

PETER T. KING, New York 

EDWARD R. ROYCE, California 

FRANK D. LUCAS, Oklahoma 

STEVAN PEARCE, New Mexico 

BILL POSEY, Florida 

BLAINE LUETKEMEYER, Missouri 

BILL HUIZENGA, Michigan 

SEAN P. DUFFY, Wisconsin 

STEVE STIVERS, Ohio 

RANDY HULTGREN, Illinois 

DENNIS A. ROSS, Florida 

ROBERT PITTENGER, North Carolina 

ANN WAGNER, Missouri 

ANDY BARR, Kentucky 

KEITH J. ROTHFUS, Pennsylvania 

LUKE MESSER, Indiana 

SCOTT TIPTON, Colorado 

ROGER WILLIAMS, Texas 

BRUCE POLIQUIN, Maine 

MIA LOVE, Utah 

FRENCH HILL, Arkansas 

TOM EMMER, Minnesota 

LEE M. ZELDIN, New York 

DAVID A. TROTT, Michigan 

BARRY LOUDERMILK, Georgia 

ALEXANDER X. MOONEY, West Virginia 

THOMAS MacARTHUR, New Jersey 

WARREN DAVIDSON, Ohio 

TED BUDD, North Carolina 

DAVID KUSTOFF, Tennessee 

CLAUDIA TENNEY, New York 

TREY HOLLINGSWORTH, Indiana 

MAXINE WATERS, California, Ranking 

Member 

CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York 

NYDIA M. VELA ́ ZQUEZ, New York 

BRAD SHERMAN, California 

GREGORY W. MEEKS, New York 

MICHAEL E. CAPUANO, Massachusetts 

WM. LACY CLAY, Missouri 

STEPHEN F. LYNCH, Massachusetts 

DAVID SCOTT, Georgia 

AL GREEN, Texas 

EMANUEL CLEAVER, Missouri 

GWEN MOORE, Wisconsin 

KEITH ELLISON, Minnesota 

ED PERLMUTTER, Colorado 

JAMES A. HIMES, Connecticut 

BILL FOSTER, Illinois 

DANIEL T. KILDEE, Michigan 

JOHN K. DELANEY, Maryland 

KYRSTEN SINEMA, Arizona 

JOYCE BEATTY, Ohio 

DENNY HECK, Washington 

JUAN VARGAS, California 

JOSH GOTTHEIMER, New Jersey 

VICENTE GONZALEZ, Texas 

CHARLIE CRIST, Florida 

RUBEN KIHUEN, Nevada 

KIRSTEN SUTTON MORK, Staff Director 

(III) 

SUBCOMMITTEE ON MONETARY POLICY AND TRADE

ANDY BARR, Kentucky, Chairman 

ROGER WILLIAMS, Texas, Vice Chairman 

FRANK D. LUCAS, Oklahoma 

BILL HUIZENGA, Michigan 

ROBERT PITTENGER, North Carolina 

MIA LOVE, Utah 

FRENCH HILL, Arkansas 

TOM EMMER, Minnesota 

ALEXANDER X. MOONEY, West Virginia 

WARREN DAVIDSON, Ohio 

CLAUDIA TENNEY, New York 

TREY HOLLINGSWORTH, Indiana 

GWEN MOORE, Wisconsin, Ranking Member 

GREGORY W. MEEKS, New York 

BILL FOSTER, Illinois 

BRAD SHERMAN, California 

AL GREEN, Texas 

DENNY HECK, Washington 

DANIEL T. KILDEE, Michigan 

JUAN VARGAS, California 

CHARLIE CRIST, Florida 

(V) 

C O N T E N T S 

Page 

Hearing held on: 

May 18, 2017 ..................................................................................................... 1 

Appendix: 

May 18, 2017 ..................................................................................................... 33 

WITNESSES 

THURSDAY, MAY 18, 2017 

Blustein, Paul, Senior Fellow, Centre for International Governance Innovation ........................................................................................................................ 4 

Gelpern, Anna, Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center, and 

Non-Resident Senior fellow, Peter G. Peterson Institute for International 

Economics ............................................................................................................. 8 

Lundsager, Meg, Public Policy Fellow, Woodrow wilson International Center 

for Scholars ........................................................................................................... 6 

Nelson, Rebecca M., Specialist in International Trade and Finance, Congressional Research Service ....................................................................................... 9 

APPENDIX 

Prepared statements: 

Blustein, Paul ................................................................................................... 34 

Gelpern, Anna ................................................................................................... 58 

Lundsager, Meg ................................................................................................ 88 

Nelson, Rebecca M. ........................................................................................... 96 

ADDITIONAL MATERIAL SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD

Barr, Hon. Andy: 

‘‘German Conservative Euro-MP Breaks Ranks Over IMF Role in Greek 

Bailout,’’ dated February 16, 2017 .............................................................. 106 

‘‘German SPD Says Europe Can Back Athens Without the IMF,’’ dated 

January 19, 2017 .......................................................................................... 108 

‘‘Germany Denies Devising Greek Rescue Plan Without IMF,’’ dated January 18, 2017 ................................................................................................. 110 

‘‘Commentary: The IMF Must Walk Away From Greece,’’ by Meg 

Lundsager, dated May 17, 2016 .................................................................. 112 

‘‘The IMF Should Get Out of Greece,’’ dated February 3, 2017 .................... 115 

‘‘Alexis Tsipras Pushes for IMF to Stay Out of Next Greek Bailout,’’ 

dated December 20, 2015 ............................................................................. 117 

Davidson, Hon. Warren: 

Chart entitled, ‘‘Heavily-Indebted EU Nations’’ ............................................ 119 

Chart entitled, ‘‘Greece Labor Force Participation Rate’’ .............................. 120 

Hill, Hon. French: 

‘‘Bailout Plan is All About ‘Rescuing Banks and Rich Greeks,’’’ dated 

May 18, 2010 ................................................................................................. 121 

(1) 

LESSONS FROM THE IMF’S 

BAILOUT OF GREECE 

Thursday, May 18, 2017 

U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, SUBCOMMITTEE ON MONETARY

POLICY AND TRADE, COMMITTEE ON FINANCIAL SERVICES, Washington, D.C. 

The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:04 a.m., in room 

2128, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Andy Barr [chairman 

of the subcommittee] presiding. 

Members present: Representatives Barr, Williams, Huizenga, 

Hill, Davidson, Tenney, Hollingsworth; Moore, Foster, Kildee, 

Vargas, and Crist. 

Ex officio present: Representative Hensarling. 

Also present: Representative Maloney. 

Chairman BARR. The Subcommittee on Monetary Policy and 

Trade will come to order. 

Without objection, the Chair is authorized to declare a recess of 

the subcommittee at any time. 

Today’s hearing is entitled, ‘‘Lessons from the IMF’s Bailout of 

Greece.’’ 

I now recognize myself for 5 minutes to give an opening statement. 

This morning’s hearing, ‘‘Lessons from the IMF’s Bailout of 

Greece,’’ will examine the International Monetary Fund’s financial 

assistance to the country of Greece, one of the largest and most 

controversial rescues in the Fund’s history. 

Under normal access rules, the IMF had traditionally lent up to 

200 percent of a country’s quota per year. When the eurozone crisis 

hit, the Fund in 2010 approved an exceptional access program for 

Greece worth 30 billion euros or 3,200 percent of quota to supplement the eurozone’s own contribution of 80 billion euros. 

In 2012, the Fund approved a second program worth over 2,000 

percent of Greece’s quota with more than 18 billion euros in new 

money. 

Many observers, including on this committee, were critical of the 

Fund’s use of a so-called systemic exemption which was created in 

order for Greece to tap exceptional access lending. This exemption 

claimed that potential spillover effects from a Greek meltdown 

compelled the Fund to waive its requirement that a member’s debt 

be sustainable with a high probability before the Fund lent money. 

Thanks to pressure from Congress, the systemic exemption has 

since been repealed, but this shouldn’t obscure the fact that the 

2 

Greek bailout has made a mockery of other IMF lending rules, too, 

as findings from the IMF’s own Evaluation Office have made clear. 

Despite receiving exceptional access, Greece remains mired in recession with youth unemployment approaching 50 percent. The 

IMF likes to speak of the catalytic role its financing can play in 

borrowing countries, but in Greece at least, the Fund’s resources 

have catalyzed nothing. Seven years after the IMF’s first program, 

Greece’s debt has worsened and is judged by the Fund as downright unsustainable. 

Today, the eurozone has set up its own bailout fund, the European Stability Mechanism, or ESM. It possesses more resources for 

just 19 eurozone countries to borrow than the IMF can deploy for 

the entire world. 

At the same time, Greek capacity remains as doubtful as ever 

with falling rates of tax collection, government arrears to domestic 

firms, and even the prosecution of the former head of Greece’s statistical office, something widely viewed as a politically motivated 

witch hunt. 

In light of these facts, it is shocking that the IMF is now considering a third bailout for the country as a junior partner to the 

ESM. No one, not even the Europeans, pretends that the Fund’s financial assistance is needed. Rather, it is meant to protect 

eurozone politicians as they head to elections this year. 

It is common knowledge that the IMF’s contribution would be 

symbolic. But if that is the case, the Fund may be on its way to 

becoming a symbolic institution. So make no mistake, if the IMF 

goes forward with a third Greek bailout, it will suggest that the 

Fund has learned little from past experience, that its role as a 

lender of last resort is in jeopardy and that its decision-making has 

been hopelessly politicized. 

The Fund will have no one to blame but itself if Congressional 

scrutiny of its activities tightens accordingly, including through future consideration of IMF governance reviews. 

As for those who claim that any IMF member including Greece 

retains at least some right to borrow, we should refer to the IMF’s 

Articles of Agreement which contain explicit provisions to limit 

loans or render a member ineligible to receive them. The articles 

stipulate that assistance shall be temporary and designed to meet 

balance-of-payments problems provided that there are adequate 

safeguards. 

I would submit that 7 years and counting does not qualify as 

temporary, and that having the IMF and ESM hand money back 

and forth to each other is not the kind of balance-of-payments crisis 

that IMF members pay their quota for. 

As for adequate safeguards, Greece is the first and only advanced 

nation to ever default on the IMF. And last year’s alleged wiretapping of IMF officials in Athens suggests that good-faith agreements are unlikely. With the eurozone attempting as we speak to 

force the IMF to water down its demands for debt relief, another 

safeguard is at risk of being made meaningless. 

In short, nothing less than the Fund’s integrity and adherence to 

its foundational principles is at stake here. I look forward to our 

witnesses’ testimony and I thank them for their participation at 

this hearing. 

3 

I yield back the remainder of my time. 

And the Chair now recognizes the ranking member of the subcommittee, the gentlelady from Wisconsin, Ms. Moore, for 5 minutes for an opening statement. 

Ms. MOORE. Good morning, Mr. Chairman, and my colleagues. 

Today is yet another exceptional day where we are going to be 

taken to school with our distinguished panel of experts, including 

our own Dr. Nelson from the Congressional Research Service. 

I want to thank you for appearing. 

And I think we are going to learn, Mr. Chairman, about the important role of the International Monetary Fund. This work is neither straight, nor is it easy. We are seeking here on this committee 

to evaluate the IMF’s roughly $32 billion contribution to the first 

Greek rescue package in 2010 through the exceptional access 

framework, the largest fund in history aimed at avoiding a Greek 

default and stemming contagion in the eurozone and more broadly. 

The eurozone crisis has revealed flaws in the architecture of Europe and whether Greece is in or out makes a compelling case for 

further economic integration, flaws that include flaws created for 

the benefit of European banks. 

Moreover, how the crisis is handled may speak volumes for the 

future of Europe and the eurozone with important economic, political, and security implications, both in the United States and globally. 

I realize that these are complicated issues, and I have my 

thoughts and opinions, but I will reserve those because I am truly 

interested in hearing from our expert witnesses. 

There are two things I would like to say: the role of the IMF in 

these situations is vital; and ongoing analysis and research that 

they provide is irreplaceable. And so I hope that we can evaluate 

the facts surrounding these events that were made looking forward 

through the fog of economic uncertainty when there are no perfect 

answers and not with the full benefit of hindsight. 

And with that, Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my 

time. 

Chairman BARR. Thank you. 

Today, we welcome the testimony of Paul Blustein, senior fellow 

at the Centre for International Governance Innovation. He is an 

award-winning journalist and author. His most recent book is, 

‘‘Laid Low: Inside the Crisis That Overwhelmed Europe and the 

IMF.’’ Mr. Blustein earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Wisconsin, and his master’s degree from Oxford University. 

Meg Lundsager is— 

Ms. MOORE. Can I—do you yield? 

Chairman BARR. Sure, Wisconsin. 

Ms. MOORE. Come on now, this is a well-educated panelist. I just 

want to point that out. 

[laughter] 

Chairman BARR. You have a fellow Badger in the house. 

Meg Lundsager is a public policy fellow at the Woodrow Wilson 

International Center for Scholars, and a former U.S. executive director and alternative executive director at the International Monetary Fund. Additionally, she is a former Deputy Assistant SecVerDate Nov 24 2008 19:11 Apr 04, 2018 Jkt 027420 PO 00000 Frm 00009 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 K:\DOCS\27420.TXT TERI
4 

retary for Trade and Investment at the U.S. Treasury Department. 

She has a master’s degree from the University of Maryland, and 

a bachelor’s degree from American University. 

Anna Gelpern is a professor of law at Georgetown University 

Law Center, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Princeton University, her J.D. from Harvard 

University, and her master’s degree from the London School of Economics and Political Science. 

Dr. Rebecca Nelson is a specialist in international trade and finance at the Congressional Research Service where she focuses on 

the International Monetary Fund, the multilateral development 

banks, and other policy areas related to international economic affairs. Dr. Nelson earned her bachelor’s degree from Johns Hopkins 

University, and her Ph.D. from Harvard. 

Each of you will be recognized now for 5 minutes to give an oral 

presentation of your testimony. And without objection, each of your 

written statements will be made a part of the record. 

Mr. Blustein, you are now recognized for 5 minutes. 

STATEMENT OF PAUL BLUSTEIN, SENIOR FELLOW, CENTRE 

FOR INTERNATIONAL GOVERNANCE INNOVATION 

Mr. BLUSTEIN. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, Ranking 

Member Moore, and members of the subcommittee. Thank you very 

much for the opportunity to provide my perspective at this hearing 

about a complex, but very important topic. 

The IMF’s role in the bailout of Greece is rich in lessons about 

the workings or non-workings of the international financial system 

and has immense implications for the future of the global economy. 

I have made something of a career of writing books, behind-thescenes books, journalistic narratives about the IMF and financial 

crises. And when I wrote a book about the Argentine crisis of 2001– 

2002, I thought I had chronicled the IMF’s greatest debacle ever. 

But financial crises are kind of a gift that keeps on giving to people 

like me and along came the Greek crisis, which has, I would argue, 

been even worse, both for the country and for the Fund’s reputation. 

So I got to write another book, the title of which you kindly mentioned, Mr. Chairman. I will mention it again, if you don’t mind. 

It is, ‘‘Laid Low: Inside the Crisis That Overwhelmed Europe and 

the IMF.’’ 

Let me begin with a tidbit from that book. I think we are going 

to get this thrown up on the slide here. Yes, okay. And I know we 

have time constraints, so this will be my only tidbit, I promise. But 

this is a memo, a confidential memo that was written by Olivier 

Blanchard who was then the IMF’s chief economist. And he wrote 

this in May 2010 as the first bailout of Greece was nearing finalization. So this memo may be a little hard to see on the screen, I 

don’t know, but the essence of it is he is saying this isn’t going to 

work. 

The bailout, just some details, was the largest in history at that 

time, 110 billion euros in emergency loans, 30 billion of which was 

to come from the IMF, the purpose being so that Greece could pay 

off all its obligations coming due over the next couple of years, reVerDate Nov 24 2008 19:11 Apr 04, 2018 Jkt 027420 PO 00000 Frm 00010 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 K:\DOCS\27420.TXT TERI
5 

assure markets on that point, and avoid a catastrophic default on 

its debt. 

And in return, Greece was expected to drastically cut its government spending and budget deficit. And to get itself out of recession 

and growing again, the Greeks were supposed to implement a very 

large number of structural reforms, for example streamlining the 

notoriously inefficient state-owned enterprises, the state railways 

for example. 

So I have underlined sort of the money bits of Blanchard’s memo. 

He says the degree of budgetary belt-tightening required of Greece 

has never been achieved by any other country. Furthermore, ‘‘even 

with full policy compliance, there is nothing that can support 

growth against the negative contribution of the public sector. The 

recovery would likely be L-shaped with a recession deeper and 

longer than projected.’’ 

It then goes on to say the program is likely to go, ‘‘off track, even 

with perfect policy implementation.’’ So to put that in a bit plainer 

English, what he was saying was that even if Greece did everything that was being asked of it, fulfilled all the conditions, the 

Greek economy would sink further and the rescue program 

wouldn’t work. 

Now, Blanchard doesn’t say so explicitly in this memo, but the 

clear implication is that Greece would need a large amount of debt 

relief much sooner rather than later. But powerful European policymakers were vehemently opposed at that time to giving Greece 

any debt relief and the rescue went ahead as per the original plan, 

a gigantic loan with conditions. And when Greece finally did get 

debt relief in 2012, it was too little, too late. 

And this was typical of a syndrome that plagued the IMF during 

the eurozone crisis. The Fund joined in several rescues despite 

grave misgivings among top economic and legal officials there and 

also some of the members of its executive board. And it did so 

under pressure from European policymakers who maintained 

heavy influence over the Fund’s levers of control. 

And some of these emergency loan packages you would have to 

say worked out pretty well. But all too often, debt was piled atop 

debt in excessively harsh conditions imposed on the crisis-stricken 

countries. And Greece was, I think, the canonical case in this regard. 

And this is a real problem in view of the IMF’s mission. This is 

a mission I really believe in. The Fund provides a global public 

good, a benefit that no single nation can provide by itself, but 

which all nations gain from, the global public good of global financial stability. 

And the crisis in Europe showed us that this is more important 

than ever because previously we thought that international bailouts were for countries in the emerging world, countries like Thailand and Indonesia, for example, and the eurozone crisis showed us 

that advanced countries need bailouts, too. So the world has really 

been put on notice about the importance of a muscular and effective IMF. 

But the eurozone crisis, I think the Greek crisis above all, was 

a bruising and enfeebling experience for the IMF. Fund economists, 

to their credit, as this memo shows, perceived serious flaws in 

6 

these bailouts, but they often yielded to the crowd of people in capitals such as Berlin and Frankfurt and Brussels and Paris. 

Now, the IMF was more independent in the latter stages of its 

crisis. But in my view, it didn’t use the greater leverage that it had 

to the extent that it should have. And this sapped the IMF of its 

most precious asset, its credibility as an independent, neutral arbiter. And this has disheartening implications for the management 

of future crises. 

So I am out of my time, Mr. Chairman. I will be happy to elaborate on these points in the Q&A. And I appreciate your incorporating my written statement in the record. 

Thanks very much. 

[The prepared statement of Mr. Blustein can be found on page 

34 of the appendix.] 

Chairman BARR. Thank you, Mr. Blustein. 

Ms. Lundsager, you are recognized for 5 minutes. 

STATEMENT OF MEG LUNDSAGER, PUBLIC POLICY FELLOW, 

WOODROW WILSON INTERNATIONAL CENTER FOR SCHOLARS 

Ms. LUNDSAGER. Thank you very much, Chairman Barr, Ranking 

Member Moore, and members of the subcommittee. 

I spent much time discussing these issues while I was at the 

IMF and continue to focus on it at the Wilson Center. And my testimony today reflects my personal views. 

Over many decades, IMF policies and lending have underpinned 

the global economic and financial stability that we all seek. The 

IMF’s early response to the eurozone crisis was key in containing 

the spread of the crisis, which benefited all members. But IMF 

lending to eurozone countries also strained IMF principles and 

weakened the IMF’s lead role in designing economic adjustment 

programs and financing packages for countries facing a balance-ofpayments crisis. 

IMF lending programs that normally encompass all aspects of 

macroeconomic and financial sector policy have been shaped more 

by European needs than by IMF standards. This eroded the IMF’s 

commitment to treat its members uniformly in terms of the types 

of policy adjustments demanded in lending programs. 

Furthermore, eurozone governments have created their own 500 

billion euro financial rescue fund, the European Stability Mechanism, and therefore do not need IMF funding. 

With little likelihood that Europe will adjust its internal rules 

and regulations to accommodate the IMF, the preferred future approach is that eurozone countries do not seek IMF lending. 

Eurozone members nonetheless retain their right under the IMF 

Articles of Agreement to request IMF financing. The IMF should 

therefore have in place a defined policy establishing its primacy in 

program design and its seniority among all creditors in lending to 

currency union members. 

The IMF requires that borrowing countries implement economic 

reforms designed to restore financial stability and balance-of-payments viability. Programs include conditions on monetary, fiscal, financial sector and exchange rate policies. If a country is a member 

of a currency union and cannot adjust its exchange rate, domestic 

7 

macro economic policies will be tightened further to restore competitiveness. 

The IMF will also work closely with bilateral and multilateral 

partners as aid and credit programs provide technical assistance 

and critical funding. Debt relief from official and private creditors 

may also be included in the financing package if the IMF assesses 

that the country will be unable to meet its debt servicing commitments or borrow new funds from private markets. 

Greece is the only eurozone member now seeking IMF assistance. 

European partners reaffirmed they are committed to providing additional future debt relief to Greece if needed and if Greece adheres 

to its reform program through 2018. The IMF has stated that European assumptions are too restrictive and the IMF continues to demand more clarity now from European partners regarding the extent of additional future debt relief European entities will provide. 

European finance ministers will meet on Monday to discuss their 

response to the IMF. 

Greece’s outstanding debt to the IMF has dropped to less than 

$14 billion while its debt to European partners remains over $200 

billion. With little financial need for a parallel-aligned program, 

the eurozone should assert its lead role in addressing its internal 

economic challenges and move forward without an IMF program 

for Greece. The IMF cannot fix the eurozone’s internal inconsistencies, only Europe can. 

However, as I mentioned, under the Articles of Agreement each 

country is entitled to request IMF financial assistance. Therefore, 

the IMF should establish a policy governing how it will lend to 

members in a currency union, particularly those in a reserve currency union, such as the euro. Recognizing this need, the IMF is 

planning to discuss conditionality in currency unions this summer, 

according to the IMF’s work program. 

The approach should include a process for the IMF to participate 

in designing the country’s economic reform program and monitoring its performance without necessarily providing financial assistance. If the country requests IMF financing, the monetary 

union should respect the IMF’s lead role in all elements of program 

design and debt sustainability assessments. The currency union’s 

institutions should share the information on their policy requirements and defer to IMF program requirements. 

The IMF contribution should be relatively small and shorter 

term than some of the recent programs have been with eurozone 

countries. The currency union’s members and leading institutions 

should explicitly recognize the preferred creditor status of the IMF, 

including with regard to their earlier disbursements. An IMF policy 

along these lines would clarify respective institutional roles and 

help point eurozone countries towards addressing their own internal imbalances. 

I look forward to your questions. Thank you. 

[The prepared statement of Ms. Lundsager can be found on page 

88 of the appendix.] 

Chairman BARR. Thank you. 

Professor Gelpern, you are recognized for 5 minutes. 

8 

STATEMENT OF ANNA GELPERN, PROFESSOR OF LAW, 

GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY LAW CENTER, AND NON-RESIDENT SENIOR FELLOW, PETER G. PETERSON INSTITUTE 

FOR INTERNATIONAL ECONOMICS 

Ms. GELPERN. Chairman Barr, Ranking Member Moore, thank 

you very much for including me. And thank you to the members 

of the subcommittee. 

I am especially honored to share this panel with people I respect 

tremendously. So it is a special pleasure for me to be here today. 

I write about financial regulation and sovereign debt restructuring, so I am really looking at this very much from the perspective of a global sovereign debt restructuring regime rather than the 

EU or Greek equities in particular. 

My main message is that the IMF remains indispensable in the 

sovereign debt restructuring. It is absolutely true, I agree with my 

colleagues, that Greece has tested it like no other. However, like 

no other actor, the IMF has shown capacity to learn from its mistakes, has undertaken substantial reforms and paradoxically now 

probably has more policy sway with less money on the line than 

it did earlier on. I think we should encourage this trajectory, reinforce the Fund’s independence. In other words, I think the lesson 

of Greece is that we need a stronger IMF, not a smaller, weaker 

IMF. 

As you know, sovereign governments that run out of money cannot file for bankruptcy. This is not just a problem for the borrowing 

country and its citizens, but also for its creditors who are doomed 

to scramble for bits and scraps in a crisis because most of the 

sovereign’s property is immune. 

Against this background, the IMF plays a vital coordinating role. 

It is literally the only actor capable of bringing together diverse domestic and external constituents around a reform program. It has 

developed unparalleled expertise in crisis management, to be sure 

nourished by its many mistakes in the past, including some of the 

ones that Paul has written about so beautifully. 

My written testimony outlines in painful, excess detail the sovereign debt restructuring context, focusing on the role of the Fund, 

and summarizes recent restructuring experience and how this role 

has come to be. 

Now, sovereign debt restructuring reform is not all about the 

IMF, far from it, but it cannot happen without the IMF. I believe 

that in the wake of Greece in particular, reform should have three 

objectives: outcomes should be sustainable; the process should be 

comprehensive and collective; and the regime as a whole must be 

intelligible and accountable to its constituents, both debtors and 

creditors. 

Greece does illustrate, again, painfully, the risk of entangling 

analysis, money, and politics. I think that when those three come 

together, analysis always loses, and that is a big problem. 

With respect to the first objective, sustainable outcomes, the IMF 

should be applauded for reforming its approach to assessing countries’ debt sustainability, opening up its methodology to outside 

scrutiny. In Europe, the IMF has been, despite all of the stumbles 

and mistakes, a force for good. The question is, where would we be 

without the IMF? What would European Union assumptions be 

9 

and where would Greece be if the IMF were out of the picture completely? 

I believe the Fund has pushed EU authorities to be more realistic in their projections. And Paul’s ‘‘smoking gun’’ memo is actually one example of internal debates yielding results over time, 

even in the face of political constraints. 

As I elaborate in my written statement, I continue to believe that 

debt sustainability analysis should be further open to debate and 

competing views. And also, in order to reduce the pressure on analysis, I believe that we need a credible story for how the international financial system deals with contagion because contagion, 

you know, the ‘‘C word,’’ has this magical effect of killing all analytic effort. 

Without bankruptcy, we have piecemeal official, private sector, 

domestic, and external restructuring and default. And I think, 

again, the IMF alone has shown capacity to bring together these 

various parties. I am particularly delighted that the Fund has 

begun to address the role of official creditors, including central 

banks. The ECB was paradoxically the biggest holdout in the 

Greek debt restructuring in 2012. There are other, even more difficult examples of official sector holdouts around the world. 

Finally, while there is no bankruptcy for sovereigns, there has 

developed a pretty regular and discernible sovereign debt restructuring regime. With this regime, the sequencing of debt restructuring, what the different actors do, is completely unintelligible 

and inaccessible to ordinary people. The IMF is ideally positioned 

to promote more transparency and intelligibility. It can easily require uniform, comprehensive disclosure of debt and debt restructuring terms. And I think it should use its power to advance this 

goal. 

To close, the IMF is in a peculiar position. It is doomed to be 

small relative to global capital flows. But the fact that it has more 

clout in Greece now with less money on the line I think is instructive. Credibility is immensely important. We should help the Fund 

hold the line, continue to rebuild its credibility, and be a force for 

good in sovereign debt management, including in Europe. 

Thank you. 

[The prepared statement of Ms. Gelpern can be found on page 58 

of the appendix.] 

Chairman BARR. Thank you for your testimony. 

And, Dr. Nelson, you are now recognized for 5 minutes. 

STATEMENT OF REBECCA M. NELSON, SPECIALIST IN INTERNATIONAL TRADE AND FINANCE, CONGRESSIONAL RESEARCH SERVICE 

Ms. NELSON. Chairman Barr, Ranking Member Moore, and members of the subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to testify 

on lessons from the IMF’s bailout of Greece. 

My testimony focuses on the policy implications of the Greek crisis for the IMF as an institution. I will summarize my statement 

with these brief remarks. 

The IMF has decades of experience responding to economic crises 

around the globe. The Greek crisis, however, took the IMF into uncharted territory. Greece was the first advanced economy to borrow 

10 

from the IMF in decades and the IMF committed significant financing in two back-to-back programs. 

The IMF entered an unusual co-financing arrangement for 

Greece with European creditors. It was also the first time that the 

IMF had designed a program for a country in a major currency 

union. 

The IMF’s record in Greece is mixed. IMF programs helped limit 

spillover from Greece to the global economy, which was struggling 

to recover from the global financial crisis. But 7 years after the 

first program, Greece’s economy remains in crisis. 

The IMF’s experience in Greece raises a number of broad policy 

questions about the IMF that continue to be relevant in Greece and 

are likely to arise in future crises. I will talk about four such questions. 

The first question relates to the size and length of IMF financing. 

Although Greece is an extreme example, there is a broader trend 

towards larger IMF programs and for some countries to require repeated IMF programs. This raises questions about whether there 

are or should be limits. 

On one hand, long-term financing veers from the IMF’s mandate 

to provide temporary financial support. Additionally, there is the 

potential for moral hazard. Governments may be less likely to 

adopt prudent economic policies if they believe that the IMF will 

step in regardless of the cost. On the other hand, limiting the resources that the IMF can deploy during crises may pose risks to 

the broader global economy. 

The second question relates to co-financing. In Greece, IMF cofinancing with European creditors limited IMF exposure to the crisis. It also limited the IMF’s independence in designing programs 

for Greece. The IMF does not have a clear policy on co-financing 

arrangements. There are questions about whether co-financing is 

desirable and, if so, how co-financing arrangements can be designed to maximize their effectiveness. The issue of co-financing is 

likely to remain salient. Regional financing arrangements have proliferated in the global economy. 

The third question relates to IMF policy flexibility and accountability. The IMF revised its lending safeguards in 2010 to allow the 

Greek program to go forward despite misgivings about Greece’s 

debt. The IMF believed that the risks from Greece to the global 

economy justified the policy change. The policy change was controversial and eventually repealed. 

Going forward, this raises questions about the appropriate balance between IMF flexibility and adherence to safeguards. Providing the IMF discretion to make policy changes allows the IMF 

to respond to unforeseen and time-sensitive crises. The risk is that 

the IMF may adopt policy changes that donor governments do not 

support and may also make the IMF less predictable as an institution. 

The fourth and last question relates to currency unions. A currency union is where two or more sovereign states adopt a common 

currency. Greece belongs to a currency union, the eurozone. The 

crisis in Greece was fundamentally tied to structural problems in 

the eurozone. The IMF, however, does not design programs for currency unions. The IMF designs programs for specific countries. 

11 

For Greece, this meant that IMF programs were focused on a relatively narrow set of policy issues and tools. Arguably, the IMF 

programs required a broader scope that addressed the eurozone crisis as a whole. How the IMF should respond to crises and currency 

unions remains a challenge for the institution. 

In conclusion, the IMF is an institution that has evolved over 

time. After a number of major crises, the IMF has adapted policies 

based on lessons learned. Greece is another pivotal crisis that 

raises questions about IMF policies and the IMF’s role in the global 

economy. Congress plays a critical role in shaping U.S. policy at 

the IMF and Congress may want to consider these policy issues. 

Mr. Chairman, this concludes my brief remarks. Thank you for 

the opportunity. 

[The prepared statement of Dr. Nelson can be found on page 96 

of the appendix.] 

Chairman BARR. Thank you all for your testimony. 

And the Chair now recognizes himself for 5 minutes. 

As many of you all alluded to, the Greeks still suffer from the 

eurozone’s highest unemployment rate. It has been around 25 percent for the past several years. And instead of helping to reduce 

Greece’s public debt-to-GDP ratio to 110 percent as planned, the 

Fund has witnessed the debt-to-GDP ratio climb to nearly 180 percent despite a major restructuring of debt in 2012. So the logical 

conclusion is that the IMF’s involvement has done little to improve 

the lives of the Greeks, in part because Greece’s leaders have slowwalked reforms for years. 

In December 2015, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras was 

unapologetic, criticizing the Fund’s ‘‘unconstructive attitude on fiscal and financial issues.’’ He indicated the IMF should stay out of 

any future bailouts and was quoted by The Financial Times as saying, ‘‘After 6 years of managing an extraordinary crisis, Europe 

now has the institutional capacity to deal successfully with intraEuropean issues.’’ 

I would ask unanimous consent that this Financial Times article 

with the headline, ‘‘Alex Tsipras Pushes for IMF to Stay Out of 

Next Greek Bailout’’ be entered into the record. 

I would also ask unanimous consent to enter into the record a 

Reuters article from January of this year noting that the Greek 

government would welcome the IMF’s being excluded from the Europeans’ bailout. 

Without objection, it is so ordered. 

So for Dr. Nelson, according to the IMF’s Articles of Agreement, 

assistance can only take place at a member’s own initiative. If the 

leaders of a member like Greece believe that the country’s crisis 

can and should be resolved by Europe alone, shouldn’t the IMF 

take Greece at its word? 

Ms. NELSON. As you say, the IMF provides financing to countries 

that request it. And if Greece isn’t requesting financial assistance, 

the IMF shouldn’t be providing financial assistance. 

Chairman BARR. Mr. Blustein, would you agree with that? 

Mr. BLUSTEIN. I think the Greeks will probably, under such circumstances, have their arms twisted and told that they should request IMF help if there is a deal. Of course, there is a big meeting 

expected on Monday, the euro group. So, Tsipras does score politVerDate Nov 24 2008 19:11 Apr 04, 2018 Jkt 027420 PO 00000 Frm 00017 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 K:\DOCS\27420.TXT TERI
12 

ical points by attacking the IMF because the IMF has been, in 

many ways, tougher than the European creditors in insisting on 

various structural reforms and insisting that targets be met and so 

he lashes out at them and then I think it is to his political advantage to do so. 

But I would bet that if there is such a deal, he will— 

Chairman BARR. Is your microphone on, sir? 

Mr. BLUSTEIN. I am pressing ‘‘talk.’’ Can you not hear me, sir? 

Ms. MOORE. Pull the microphone up to your mouth. 

Mr. BLUSTEIN. Oh, okay. Sorry. 

Chairman BARR. Pull your microphone towards you, sir. Thank 

you very much. 

Mr. BLUSTEIN. Okay, thank you. 

Chairman BARR. That is better. 

Mr. BLUSTEIN. Okay. I can hear myself. But anyway, sorry. 

So my basic point was that I think, although Tsipras loves to 

beat up on the IMF for political reasons, if there is a deal that the 

IMF can live with, my guess is that the European creditors will 

twist his arm and tell him that he has to ask for aid from the IMF. 

So that formal request would be forthcoming. But we don’t know 

what is going to be happening next week. 

Chairman BARR. One of you referred to moral hazard. And it 

does sound like the IMF is creating moral hazard. If the IMF were 

to move forward with a third bailout, the IMF would be giving 

Greece a third credit card to max out and incentivizing the very behavior that got Greece into trouble in the first place with little or 

no meaningful prospect for a long-term, sustainable solution. 

It seems to me that Greece needs to enact some tangible reforms 

that would lead to growth and increase revenue. 

So, Ms. Lundsager, do you agree that a third bailout would create that moral hazard? 

Ms. LUNDSAGER. Mr. Chairman, I have a hard time dealing with 

moral hazard because when I see what countries have to go 

through I never felt that the IMF created the incentive for countries to mismanage their economy and then come to the IMF for 

help. Because we have seen, especially in the case of Greece, how 

painful that is and how Mr. Tsipras has had to walk back from earlier claims of, ‘‘Well, we are not going to invite the IMF in.’’ He 

must already have approached the IMF and said, ‘‘I want another 

program,’’ because the IMF has been part of the teams that have 

been in Athens negotiating the policy package. 

So on the moral hazard side, perhaps there is some moral hazard 

on the part of the private sector that thinks they will be able to 

get out before a debt restructuring happens. But at this point, 

there isn’t too much private sector debt left. It has all been turned 

into official debt Greece owes to European partners. 

Chairman BARR. Thank you. 

My time has expired, but I would invite, as the questions continue, the other panelists to comment on that issue of moral hazard. 

And with that, I will now recognize the ranking member of the 

subcommittee for 5 minutes. 

Ms. MOORE. Thank you so much, Mr. Chairman. 

13 

Of course, I have more questions than answers as we see the evolution of this. And I was really interested in what seemed to be a 

consistent theme with all of you that there are structural reforms 

that were needed. 

But, Mr. Blustein, you talked about the belt-tightening not having been achieved. And I guess I want you to share with me briefly 

why you thought that hadn’t occurred. Was the conditionality too 

great? In particular, I want to know if there was some conditionality with regard to requiring Greece to collect taxes aggressively 

from the oligarchs there. 

Mr. BLUSTEIN. There was conditionality of that sort. I think on 

the fiscal conditionality, it is fair to say that Greece delivered on 

a lot of that. That was kind of part of the problem. The belt-tightening part of the program worked, and it had a very dampening 

effect on the economy. 

The theory of the first program was, Greece had an exploding 

debt-to-GDP ratio. That was what everyone was worried about. So 

if you tighten fiscal policy and the country can run big surpluses 

as they were projecting, then the country would be able to pay 

down its debt. The trouble is, that takes money out of people’s 

pockets. 

Ms. MOORE. Austerity. 

Mr. BLUSTEIN. So then GDP falls. So the theory was, well, how 

are we going to get this economy to grow to get out of this trap that 

it is in? Now, Greece is a member of the eurozone. They are not 

allowed to cut interest rates, they are not allowed to pump up the 

money supply, they are not allowed to devalue their currency as 

many countries do when they are in situations like that. 

So the theory was, we will have structural reforms and that will 

increase the efficiency of the economy and that will help pump up 

growth. And I think a lot of the structural reforms made very good 

sense. You can’t argue—I think most economists wouldn’t argue— 

with the value of making state-owned enterprises more efficient, 

liberalizing a lot of the professions that had been kept closed to 

help special interests. 

Ms. MOORE. But in the long run, austerity was just not the answer to it; that didn’t work. 

Mr. BLUSTEIN. I would put it slightly differently. The idea of, and 

I guess this is the main point of Blanchard’s memo in a way, is 

that the structural reforms will take so long to work—they will 

have beneficial impacts eventually, but the effects of the austerity 

dampening the economy will be so great. And the structural reforms actually in the short run often have a negative impact on the 

economy. 

Ms. MOORE. You are interesting. We are going to have to have 

lunch. 

But I want to hear from Dr. Nelson and the ladies here because 

you have all talked about the importance of the IMF having been 

there in the beginning to prevent the contagion from spreading. 

And so, Dr. Nelson, Professor Gelpern, let us just have a dialogue 

for the next minute and 43 seconds. Go for it. 

Ms. NELSON. I do think the IMF’s programs were successful in 

stemming contagion of the crisis. I think it is important to remember that when the first program for Greece was approved in 2010, 

14 

it was on the heels of the global financial crisis. And there was 

broad consensus among the international community. 

Ms. MOORE. Right. And Secretary Paulson came and asked for $700 billion, not $32 billion. 

Ms. NELSON. Right. 

Ms. MOORE. Just saying. 

Ms. NELSON. And I think the IMF programs did contribute to 

preventing another Lehman-style shock to the system. However, I 

don’t think anyone believes that the economic situation in Greece 

has been successful or that there is even a long-term plan for restoring economic viability in Greece. 

Ms. MOORE. Dr. Gelpern, the intellectual benefits of the IMF’s 

intervention are what? 

Ms. GELPERN. They are the only ones that literally have the 

methodology that has been tested, that can tell a credible story. 

And they also have an internal organization that enables some 

kind of debate. And they have a board, including the United States, 

that can exercise checks and balances. 

I did want to return and connect this to the topic of moral hazard. 

Ms. MOORE. Yes. 

Ms. GELPERN. I think the one type of moral hazard we are not 

talking about is political moral hazard. And there are two types of 

political moral hazard that we see in Greece. One is exemplified 

by—I guess ‘‘trash talking’’ is not a very polite way to describe Mr. 

Tsipras’s occasional comments on the role of the international community, but they are free to say that when they know it will have 

little impact on what is going to happen behind closed doors. 

He was saying that the IMF should stay out after the IMF had 

stopped disbursing for almost a year and less than a month before 

the program was formally done. 

So while I think that it is absolutely true that the IMF should 

not be financing countries that are not truly committed to the program, I am not sure that this commitment necessarily follows from 

the leader’s public words. 

But the other one, and I will just mention it briefly and I am 

happy to elaborate later is, the moral hazard of European leaders 

telling their own citizens that they are going to be repaid in full. 

The fact is that over 200 billion euro in government-to-government 

debt is now on Greece’s back for decades to come. 

Chairman BARR. The gentlelady’s time has expired. 

Ms. GELPERN. I’m sorry. 

Ms. MOORE. I thank you for your indulgence, Mr. Chairman. This 

is fascinating. We have other Members here, so maybe we will get 

a chance to get to Ms. Lundsager and hear more. 

Thank you so much. You guys are so brilliant, you gals and guy. 

Chairman BARR. Thank you. 

The Chair now recognizes the vice chairman of the subcommittee, Mr. Williams. 

Mr. WILLIAMS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

And for all the witnesses, thank you for your testimony today. 

I think it is safe to say, Mr. Chairman, that in business, the private sector, you want to make sure you get the best deal for your 

company and your shareholders. In this case, the shareholder, the 

15 

American taxpayer, should be confident that their money is being 

spent wisely. And just like any business deal, when a deal goes 

bad, sometimes you have to walk away and cut your losses. 

According to some of our testimony today, Greece’s outstanding 

debt to the IMF has dropped to less than $14 billion. Greece is currently paying 3.8 percent lending rate to the IMF. The interest rate 

to the European creditors is only .72 percent on roughly $200 billion. The European Stability Mechanism’s (ESM’s) 2015 annual report proudly underlines that its financing is a fraction of the cost 

of the Fund’s. 

My first question is for Mr. Blustein. If the ESM provides cheaper financing than the IMF, why should the Greeks be forced to take 

on the Fund’s pricier loans? If an individual is facing financial disaster and only had two credit lines, wouldn’t we advise them to go 

with the lowest interest rate possible? 

Mr. BLUSTEIN. The problem is that countries like Germany, the 

Netherlands, Finland, members of the eurozone that would be endorsing the provision of ESM money for Greece, those countries are 

insisting that the IMF be there, putting some of its own money on 

the line and providing its seal of approval. So it is a bit of a Catch22. 

But in theory, you are right. If the Europeans want to do it 

themselves, and particularly if the IMF feels that Greece is not 

being put in a sustainable debt position, whatever Greece wants, 

whatever Germany wants, the IMF should say no. 

Mr. WILLIAMS. Ms. Lundsager, could you talk about that please? 

Ms. LUNDSAGER. Thank you, Congressman. We will get a bit of 

an answer to your question on Monday when the European ministers meet to discuss this. But I would be delighted if they decided 

to use the ESM funding to basically clear off Greece’s obligations 

to the IMF. I think it would be a benefit to Greece. 

It is, as Mr. Blustein said, the other European capitals which 

want the IMF involved for credibility of the adjustment program. 

But my concern is that Europe itself needs to do more to develop 

its own internal unity to become more of a union. And bringing in 

the IMF may not necessarily help them do that when they have to 

grapple with the changes they need internally to make themselves 

function more as a union. 

And, of course, we saw the meeting between the new French 

president and Angela Merkel earlier this week get off to a very 

good start, but there are still wide divergences between those two 

key economies. If they can agree on some of the reforms needed, 

perhaps then there will be a way forward. But I still do not believe 

the IMF is the one that ultimately can fix this monetary union. 

Mr. WILLIAMS. Okay, thank you. 

Dr. Nelson, why would we take the IMF’s concerns about debt seriously if the Fed doesn’t insist on the Greeks receiving the least 

expensive financing available? And if the Fund is serious about 

Greece’s debt burden, shouldn’t it step aside and let the ESM provide cheaper financing? 

Ms. NELSON. I think that is certainly an option that the IMF 

could pursue. If debt sustainability is the issue, go with the cheapest source of funding. 

16 

I think one issue that people are talking about is, is there a role 

for the IMF to play in responding to the Greek crisis through sort 

of technical assistance and helping Europeans design the program 

without putting forward money itself? And so that might be one option that people are exploring. 

Mr. WILLIAMS. Okay. 

Dr. Lundsager, the IMF has concluded that Greece needs significant debt relief. Would you agree that debt relief is required for 

Greece’s debt to become sustainable and to prevent further bailouts 

past 2018? 

Ms. LUNDSAGER. Absolutely, Congressman. And my preference 

would be for an outright haircut on the principal, the outstanding 

principal, so that the Greek population, the private sector, wouldn’t 

face this 180 percent of GDP debt out there. But that is not what 

the Europeans are prepared to do. What they are prepared to do 

is greatly—well, we will find out how far they will extend grace periods and maturities to basically have the equivalent of having a 

reduction in the outstanding principal. 

But restoring incentives to invest, to hire in Greece, I think, is 

a real challenge. And we are not quite getting there yet. Thank 

you. 

Mr. WILLIAMS. Really quickly, Dr. Blustein, could you say something about that? 

Mr. BLUSTEIN. I completely agree. It certainly would be preferable if Europe would agree to outright forgiveness. And the moral 

hazard that Professor Gelpern referred to before, that you need to 

say to Europe, look, you lent money foolishly to Greece in 2010 and 

thereafter, and if we keep sort of enabling you to do that, we understand that you have political problems explaining this to your 

citizens that you are not going to be repaid in full and you can go 

on doing what Meg Lundsager referred to as the extending the maturities. 

But that is, I think, a poor way to go about really helping the 

Greek people get some hope of some getting out of the trap that 

they have been in now for the past 7, 8 years. 

Chairman BARR. The gentleman’s time has expired. 

Mr. WILLIAMS. Thank you for the time. 

Chairman BARR. And the Chair now recognizes the gentleman 

from Michigan, Mr. Kildee, for 5 minutes. 

Mr. KILDEE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and Ranking Member 

Moore, for holding this hearing. 

And to the panelists, thank you very much for your participation. 

I do have to say, I noted with a little chuckle that the comment 

about Mr. Tsipras engaging in trash talk in the effort to pander to 

a domestic political base that might also degrade the standing that 

he and the nation he serves might have is a lesson that could be 

applied to a number of countries, including the one that we are all 

sitting in right now. 

So you don’t have to comment on that unless you want to. 

I would be interested in pursuing a little bit more where Ms. 

Moore left off on the question of austerity and other conditions. 

And starting with Mr. Blustein, you mentioned, I think you said 

anyway, that your analysis, that the belt-tightening essentially 

worked. I wonder if you could just explain that in a little more deVerDate Nov 24 2008 19:11 Apr 04, 2018 Jkt 027420 PO 00000 Frm 00022 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 K:\DOCS\27420.TXT TERI
17 

tail and also expand that to touch on the other sort of systemic reforms that have a longer curve to them and what your assessment, 

and perhaps each of you could manage a point on this, what you 

think the balance of those might be. 

And secondly, whether or not additional measures in either category would apply in order to follow up on Ms. Lundsager’s notion 

that you might all comment on also on whether or not principal reduction would come with pretty significant other conditions in 

order to achieve that. 

If you could each comment, I would appreciate it. 

Mr. BLUSTEIN. Just to clarify, when I said that the austerity 

worked, I guess what I mean is, to a large extent, it was delivered 

on. Greece did undergo a tremendous amount of fiscal consolidation 

on both the spending and tax sides. So it worked too well; it killed 

the Greek economy. 

Mr. KILDEE. That is where I was going. 

Mr. BLUSTEIN. Yes, okay. 

Mr. KILDEE. Because when you said it worked, you meant it 

worked in that they complied. 

Mr. BLUSTEIN. They delivered on that. And a lot of the structural 

reforms they actually didn’t deliver. And one of the arguments that 

is made in defense of the original program is, well—and this is the 

IMF, I am sorry to say, they often do this. When programs don’t 

work, they say, well, the country didn’t deliver, they didn’t do what 

we asked, they didn’t fulfill the conditions. And it is, you know, you 

can’t say, you have to admit that Greece didn’t deliver on quite a 

number of the structural reforms. 

I would argue that even if Greece had delivered on those structural reforms, as I would argue that Blanchard in retrospect was 

absolutely right, even if they do all that stuff, those structural reforms are not going to help, they are not going to offset the effects 

of the austerity because those things take a long time to work. 

In the short run, they actually have a dampening effect on the 

economy. If you are streamlining an inefficient state-owned enterprise, you are laying people off, and those people have less money 

in their pockets. So, now, it may be a good thing to do in the long 

run because those jobs are inefficient and you need to, you need to 

make the economy work better. 

So when I said the austerity ‘‘worked,’’ I don’t mean to suggest 

that it ‘‘worked.’’ 

Mr. KILDEE. Okay, that makes more sense because I was curious 

as to how much of what Mr. Barr referred to in terms of the now 

increased debt-to-GDP ratio could be attributable to the lag in the 

economy that was precipitated by some of those austerity measures. 

I wonder if the other panelists might also comment on this general subject. 

Ms. LUNDSAGER. No. I do think that Mr. Blustein is absolutely 

correct. The austerity in terms of contracting the economy made it 

even more difficult to then address the debt. But the other side of 

the coin is Greece has lagged on the structural reforms that it 

needs and they are very difficult. They are the kind of labor market 

reforms in order to get employers to hire more workers. They need 

18 

to be able to actually occasionally fire workers and there are very 

stringent worker protections in Greece. 

Additionally, pensions and other benefits were increased substantially after Greece joined the eurozone because they had access 

to very low interest rates as part of the eurozone and basically 

made a lot of promises that the real side of their economy couldn’t 

deliver, didn’t have the productivity, the competitiveness to deliver 

the real output that could then satisfy those pensions and the other 

commitments they made. 

Greece is now struggling to try and do some of that. But in the 

meantime, the Europeans are demanding very tough austerity for 

a number of years to get Greece back to debt sustainability. The 

IMF is pressing back and saying no, that is not going to happen, 

you Europeans need more up-front debt relief. Therefore, I do think 

it is going to be very difficult to generate the kind of confidence in 

the Greek private sector that will create jobs, will increase production, will revitalize that economy. Thank you. 

Mr. KILDEE. Thank you very much. 

Chairman BARR. The gentleman’s time has expired. 

The Chair now recognizes the gentleman from Indiana, Mr. Hollingsworth. 

Mr. HOLLINGSWORTH. Good morning. Thank you, everybody, for 

being here. I really appreciate all of the insights that have been 

shared so far. 

I wanted to turn our attention to something that I think Dr. Nelson and Ms. Lundsager brought up, which is the IMF’s effectiveness operating inside a currency union. 

Today, I think a quarter of IMF membership is made up by countries that are involved in some sort of currency union. So I think 

this is a problem that we are going to see in the future. So for a 

moment, setting aside primacy of repayment, but focusing just on 

the economic issues themselves and the challenges that the IMF 

may face in responding to a crisis for a country that is in a currency union, could you start, Dr. Nelson, and talk about the economic challenges associated with that? 

Ms. NELSON. Sure. So the IMF designs programs for countries. 

It doesn’t design programs for currency unions. And I think how 

that played out in Greece was the crisis was tied to fundamental 

imbalances across the eurozone, but the IMF program, by focusing 

only on policies, regulations, things under the authority of the 

Greek government, it was only looking at one piece of a bigger puzzle. 

Mr. HOLLINGSWORTH. Correct. 

Ms. NELSON. And so I think some of the problems that we are 

seeing play out in Greece now are tied to this sort of narrow look 

at the crisis as it played out. 

Mr. HOLLINGSWORTH. Right. 

Ms. Lundsager, would you like to add to that? 

Ms. LUNDSAGER. Yes, thank you. In dealing with the currency 

union the IMF had to take monetary policy as a given, interest rate 

policy, exchange rate policy as a given, so that greatly narrowed 

the tools available. 

Mr. HOLLINGSWORTH. Right. 

19 

Ms. LUNDSAGER. And, of course, those polices were set for the entire eurozone or for the entire currency union, not for the country 

itself. So monetary conditions were too tight for Greece, they could 

be looser. And you see that tension still within the monetary union 

right now, within the eurozone, as some countries, for example, 

Germany, complain that monetary policy is too loose. 

The policy measures that would normally be in an IMF program 

and help a country recover would include monetary policy and exchange rate policy, meaning the country would need less of the fiscal contraction. Thank you. 

Mr. HOLLINGSWORTH. Right. 

Mr. Blustein? 

Mr. BLUSTEIN. This is a really great question and it is something 

that I wrote about with some I guess you could say passion or 

maybe even sort of starry-eyed, crazy idealism in my book. 

The IMF was coming to the rescue not only of Greece, it was 

coming to the rescue of the euro or the European Monetary Union. 

And the IMF had been put, at the outset of the crisis, in a position 

of junior partner in the troika with the European Commission and 

the European central bank. 

I would argue that the IMF should have played a senior partner 

role. In fact, I argue that it should have played a super-senior role. 

Meaning I think the IMF should have been in the position where 

it was able to say to all of Europe the following things are going 

to happen, not only in Greece, but in Europe. The ECB is going to 

do this and Germany is going to do that and you all are going to 

be doing this on banking, union and what not. 

I think the crisis would have been solved a lot sooner, I think 

it would have been a lot easier to have a debt restructuring in 

Greece or in— 

Mr. HOLLINGSWORTH. So I think, like you said, kind of wrong 

tools for the situation or an inability to be able to diagnose and 

treat all of the symptoms at the same time, instead focusing on a 

single symptom, in hopes that that would migrate to other aspects. 

So I guess I would start again with Dr. Nelson. Is this a permanent defect or inability of the IMF to handle a currency union crisis? Or given the players that you probably know, you have seen 

more than me, do you think the IMF will be able to effectively 

work with the currency union as a whole to be able to get at some 

of the other symptoms? 

Ms. NELSON. Sure. The IMF’s Articles of Agreement doesn’t talk 

about programs for currency unions. It is not something that is sort 

of by design. The IMF has started grappling with this issue. For 

example, in its surveillance programs, it started having Article IV 

consultations for the eurozone as a whole. 

I do think there is a mismatch still between with the programs, 

is that, is it appropriate to design programs for specific countries? 

Or do they need to address the broader currency union as a whole? 

And it is not clear that sort of the founding document, the governing document of the IMF addresses that issue. 

Mr. HOLLINGSWORTH. It is clear that the problem exists. It is not 

clear whether the IMF can solve that. Right? 

Ms. NELSON. Right. And I would also add that through design by 

focusing on specific countries rather than the broader eurozone as 

20 

a whole, it imposes all the costs of adjustment on the weaker members of the currency union. It exempts the stronger sort of members 

from playing any part in the adjustment process. 

Mr. HOLLINGSWORTH. Correct. Which they certainly had a part in 

creating the problem. Correct? 

Ms. NELSON. Right, right. 

Mr. HOLLINGSWORTH. My time is almost expired. But again, I 

want to reiterate my deep concern that the IMF’s inability to get 

at all of the symptoms of the disease will lead to a poor outcome, 

both for the Greek economy and, ultimately I worry about, for the 

IMF as well, that they don’t have the tools to be able to tackle the 

problem when we expect them to do so and asking them to do more 

than they can do and then holding them accountable for the failure 

to do so is probably inappropriate for both the institution and for 

the Greek economy itself. 

Chairman BARR. The gentleman’s time has expired. The Chair 

now recognizes the gentlelady from New York, Mrs. Maloney. 

Mrs. MALONEY. Thank you, Chairman Barr and Ranking Member Moore, now represented by Mr. Foster, for allowing me to participate in this hearing. 

I am a strong advocate for Greece. I believe that it is critically 

important that Greece remains in the European Union. And I believe they have been strong allies to the United States and our relationship remains strong as Greece endures an unprecedented economic crisis. It has been a strong pillar of democracy and stability 

in the West and plays a vital role in protecting U.S. security interests in Europe. One of our major bases is placed there. 

So I thank the chairman and the ranking member for holding the 

hearing. 

And I would like to ask Ms. Lundsager about debt relief for 

Greece. You noted in your testimony that debt relief could provide 

additional fiscal resources for Greece, which could be used to invest 

in her economy and for additional social services which are badly 

needed. In other words, the less money that they have to pay to 

the European creditors, the more money it will have to get its economy going again. 

And I recall in our own financial crisis, one of the ways that we 

dug our way out was not through austerity, but through really 

stimulus packages and ways to stimulate the economy and investing in our infrastructure and really investing with resources into 

our own economy. 

So my two questions for you are, first, do you believe that debt 

relief is a necessary component of a new lending program, whether 

or not the IMF is involved in the new lending program? 

Ms. LUNDSAGER. Yes, Congresswoman, I do believe that no matter what, whether the IMF is involved or not, debt relief needs to 

be part of the future relationship the Europeans have with Greece. 

Mrs. MALONEY. What about the other panelists? How do you 

feel? How would you respond? I will invite anyone who would like 

to respond to respond. 

Ms. GELPERN. If I may, Congresswoman, I agree entirely that 

debt relief is essential. And I also want to second Ms. Lundsager’s 

point that principal reduction, I think, is not just economically, but 

politically important. 

21 

And in this picture, the IMF stands for relief and reform, which 

are two things that are critical for Greece. The European Union is 

a bit of a question mark on both. So I have no religion about 

whether the IMF puts in money. In fact, I am delighted that they 

are able to exercise influence without it, I think it is great for us. 

But I do think that it is advocating the right thing, debt relief foremost among them, and I think it should stand firm. Thank you. 

Mrs. MALONEY. Okay. 

And second, Ms. Lundsager, do you think the best form of debt 

relief would be a reduction in principal as some have advocated? 

Or would simply extending the loans and lowering the interest rate 

be sufficient? 

Ms. LUNDSAGER. Thank you. I continue to believe that outright 

principal reduction would be best. And I come back to my earlier 

comments that this would be a signal to the Greek economy that 

there would not be a future, very heavy burden of debt repayment, 

even if it is far in the future, because what Greece needs is investment, it needs job creation, it needs internal growth. 

The Europeans have been very clear that they will not do principal reduction. The IMF has therefore pushed them to have such 

very long grace periods and maturities on the outstanding debt 

that, for all practical purposes, for decades Greece would be paying 

very little back to its European partners. So that is certainly a second or third or fourth-best option. 

But Greece is part of this eurozone, they have chosen to be part 

of this eurozone, and so that means they have to work it out within 

the eurozone, too. The IMF is not in a position to dictate how the 

eurozone undertakes its internal deliberations and agreements. 

Thank you. 

Mrs. MALONEY. Do you think it would be better for Greece to just 

leave the European Union and the debt and just go on their own? 

Are there any comments on that from, starting first with you, Ms. 

Lundsager, and then Ms. Gelpern? 

Ms. LUNDSAGER. If Greece had dropped out of the eurozone, perhaps not the EU, the European Union, but had dropped out of the 

eurozone years ago, ultimately in the long run it probably would 

have been better off because it would have had a very large devaluation of its currency, let us say the drachma, and that would have 

helped restore competitiveness and bring jobs back. 

With that said, that is not what the Greek population wanted. 

The one thing that has been clear year after year after year is that 

they want to stay in the eurozone, which at times I have found a 

little bit remarkable. So in that case, it is their own choice, too, to 

undertake the reforms that they need to stay in. 

Chairman BARR. The gentlelady’s time has expired. 

The gentleman from Arkansas, Mr. Hill, is recognized for 5 minutes. 

Mr. HILL. I thank the chairman and the ranking member for 

holding this hearing. 

I agree with Mrs. Maloney’s comments that Greece is certainly 

an important, long-term partner in Europe and a longtime friend 

of the United States. But the structural differences that we have 

about the role of the IMF in the EU are really illustrated in this 

hearing today. 

22 

Dr. Nelson, I noted in your testimony that you noted how the 

IMF’s first bailout socialized much of the private debt that Greece 

had owed. And much of this debt was held by German and French 

financial institutions. And back in 2010, the former head of Germany’s central bank said in an interview, ‘‘The bailout was about 

protecting German banks, but especially the French banks from 

debt write-offs.’’ 

On the same day that the rescue package was agreed upon, 

shares of French banks rose by 24 percent. Looking at that, you 

can see what this was really about, which was rescuing banks and 

rich Greeks, he says. 

And I ask that this interview be entered into the record, Mr. 

Chairman. 

Chairman BARR. Without objection, it will be made a part of the 

record. 

Mr. HILL. Thank you. 

So Germany and France are two of the richest countries in the 

world. And if you believe that their banks needed to be propped up, 

is it really the IMF’s job to recapitalize rich-country banks? Doesn’t 

this just present a conflict of interest on the part of the IMF’s 

board of directors? What are your thoughts on that? 

Ms. NELSON. I think one thing people have talked about after the 

experience of 2010 was, would it have been better to let Greece default in 2010 and use the European money to recapitalize French 

and German banks? Would that have made the banks better off, 

would that have addressed the contagion issues? And would Greece 

be better off today without this sort of large, outstanding debt? 

However, it is not clear that there was a mechanism in place to 

do that. We didn’t have a European Stability Mechanism at the 

time, we didn’t have a process for recapitalizing banks. But in 

hindsight, this is something that I think people have talked about. 

I also think it gets at the issue of moral hazard. We have talked 

a lot about political moral hazard or moral hazard by governments 

that borrow from the IMF. But there is also moral hazard from private investors who make investments, but may not bear the full 

consequences of investments that they have made when it goes 

bad. 

Mr. HILL. This committee knows something about that from 

watching Puerto Rico. 

So what is the lesson? 

Mr. Blustein, just a moment, I will come to you. 

Just what is the lesson for the ECB and Europe on—the European mechanism is one item. What other reforms should Europe 

take into account to kind of solve their own internal currency zone 

issues like this? 

Ms. NELSON. I think two of the issues that have been discussed 

are greater coordination of fiscal policies and the creation of a European banking union, both of which are in progress, but it is not 

clear to me, have those policies been completely harmonized and 

coordinated across the eurozone or the broader EU. 

Mr. HILL. You think we would still have faced a similar challenge that we have even if they had been harmonized? Or do you 

think it would have been a different policy outcome? 

23 

Ms. NELSON. I don’t know. I don’t know how it would play out 

if we had a similar situation today. There are certainly institutions 

that have been created, like the European Stability Mechanism, 

that could help address a crisis, that didn’t exist in 2010. But it 

is not clear if they would do something to address the issues in the 

banking system rather than address the issues of a debtor government who owes money to French and German banks. 

Mr. HILL. Right. 

Mr. Blustein, let me let you comment. 

Mr. BLUSTEIN. Yes. I just wanted to come back to your point 

about what the motive was for the original bailout and whether it 

was saving German and French banks. 

I spent a lot of time interviewing people for my book and that 

was one of the questions that I looked into a lot. And I would have 

loved to have found a smoking gun indicating that this was a major 

motive for the key players either in Europe or at the IMF. 

And there there is no question that French officials in particular 

were keenly aware of the exposures of banks, like Societe Generale 

and Paribas and so forth, that they had large exposures to Greece. 

And I don’t doubt for a minute that this was a consideration for 

them. 

But I take people at their word when they say that their main 

concern, the main reason why they adopted the approach that they 

did was fear of contagion. If Greece was either going to default or 

be allowed to restructure its debt, this was going to have knockon effects, people would dump the bonds of other vulnerable countries in the eurozone. 

This was certainly the thinking of Jean Claude Trichet, the 

president of the European central bank. I am very critical of Jean 

Claude Trichet, a lot of the positions that he took during the crisis. 

But I do think he was sincere in his concerns and a lot of the policymakers were, and that was the key reason why the approach 

that was taken was taken. 

I am aware of the interview you are referring to— 

Chairman BARR. The gentleman’s time has expired. 

Mr. BLUSTEIN. —but I don’t think that was the prime motive. 

Chairman BARR. Thank you. 

The gentleman from Illinois, Mr. Foster, is now recognized. 

Mr. FOSTER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

And thank you to all the witnesses here. 

There are a number of very interesting lessons that the world, 

as well as our country, I think should learn from this. In general, 

there seem to be three possible futures here. There is one possibility where Greece just leaves the union, repudiates the debt. So 

if we go down that route, what would the immediate impact be on 

banks around the world, on bondholders and so on? Has that actually been worked out in any detail so that people have an idea of 

what that would look like? 

Ms. LUNDSAGER. Congressman, Greece’s debt for the most part is 

owed to European official creditors, to governments, to European 

institutions that they set up, both the European Stability Mechanism, but more to the earlier mechanisms they had set up. So it 

is not really owed to banks so much and so I don’t think the impact 

would reverberate around the world. 

24 

I think there is a bigger concern within Europe, especially after 

the U.K. vote to leave the European Union, that if Greece were to 

leave, it is showing that the continental system, the political system that they have struggled so hard to build could start to fracture. I think that is why it is so important that the German-French 

let’s say amity or the good start to the new relationship be cemented and that they move forward on the internal reforms that 

they need. 

Mr. FOSTER. It would also presumably have a bad impact on the 

creditworthiness of other southern European countries that are in 

roughly comparable situations. 

Ms. LUNDSAGER. Yes. I think that could be a concern because 

there is a quite a bit of concern about Italy and its banking system 

and, of course, what those banks, what they owe to other creditors 

is not necessarily to official creditors, it is to other financial institutions within Europe. So there is, I think, a deeper worry there. 

Mr. FOSTER. Right. So the other class of solutions, just a big 

haircut, both to the debtors, and also the pensioners, I guess, are 

another potential entity in a position to take a big haircut. 

Ms. LUNDSAGER. Yes, they are going to have to pare back their 

pensions and take the kind of reforms that the IMF actually recommends to many countries. As you know, older retirement ages 

mean contributions for longer periods and a smaller pension. And 

this comes back to what I said earlier that Greece ended up, once 

it joined the eurozone and benefited from very low interest rates, 

ended up spending more on pensions, promising more to its citizens 

than it could deliver based on the real productivity of its economy. 

Mr. FOSTER. Right. This is the problem with having a monetary 

union without a fiscal union. 

Ms. LUNDSAGER. Exactly, yes. 

Mr. FOSTER. Which has been pointed out by many people, even 

at the time it was made. 

And that then, a future where you have potentially repetitive 

bailouts like that or haircuts like that, ends up looking like I guess 

they call it a transfer union where there is just a systematic—it is 

sort of like what is going on in the United States where there is 

a limited number of States, generally the large-population States, 

that write a huge check to the rural and Southern and Western 

States. I know in my State of Illinois, we lose about $40 billion a 

year, which is very comparable to the Greek subsidy, because we 

pay a lot more in Federal taxes than we get back in Federal spending. And these checks are largely written to rural, southern States. 

But this is the way we have lived for at least 40 years in the 

United States and it has real, long-term impacts. And so that is a 

possible future, that the Germans will just continually write checks 

to subsidize the pensioners in Greece. And I guess that is one of 

the things that makes it so difficult politically. 

The third possibility is just a massive increase in taxes and tax 

compliance in Greece. If Greece could solve the tax compliance 

problem, what fraction of the problem would that solve? 

Ms. LUNDSAGER. It would go part way towards helping Greece 

with its own internal resources for its own internal needs, but it 

wouldn’t be enough to address their debt servicing requirements 

over the many decades of the future. They couldn’t possibly— 

25 

Mr. FOSTER. And would, for example, a principal write-off followed by a much higher rate of tax compliance actually solve the 

problem? 

Ms. LUNDSAGER. That, I think, could give them a clean slate and 

perhaps make it easier then to generate the domestic support for 

these kind of reforms that would make the economy more competitive and would broaden tax compliance and help them enforce better their own internal laws. 

I was in Greece a couple of years ago and I was stunned at how 

difficult it is for them to even get compliance, to get effective enforcement of their own laws and regulations. 

Mr. FOSTER. There is that famous aerial photograph of, I guess 

it is the suburbs of Athens, with all the swimming pools. 

Ms. LUNDSAGER. Yes. 

Mr. FOSTER. And in an area that there were three registered 

swimming pools and hundreds of visible swimming pools. 

I guess my time is up at this point. 

Chairman BARR. Thank you. The gentleman’s time has expired. 

The Chair now recognizes the gentleman from Ohio, Mr. Davidson. 

Mr. DAVIDSON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

And thank you to our guests. I appreciate your expertise and 

your presence here today. 

When solving problems, it is vitally important to address cause 

and effect and to understand what are indeed the root causes if we 

are to see a lasting solution. So as we have sat here and talked 

about haircuts to debt, I think we are glossing over, how did we 

get here in the first place? 

Ms. Lundsager, has Greece addressed the root causes that led to 

their need for this new debt? 

Ms. LUNDSAGER. I think they have made quite a bit of progress 

in doing that, but no, they still have a number of structural reforms to undertake to make their economy more competitive, to 

make their workers able to work, to make their citizens willing to 

share in the responsibility of financing their government and accepting that they will be getting somewhat, everybody, reduced 

benefits over time. So they still have a ways to go on that and I 

think it has been very difficult, especially for countries like Germany where they have managed to undertake labor reforms and 

managed to make many of the improvements over time, to then 

continue with the prospect of supporting Greece. But that is going 

to be the likely outcome. 

Mr. DAVIDSON. Yes, thank you. You touched on a number of 

things there that I think are important. One is, some countries in 

the EU have stronger economies than others. Some have reformed 

their economies and found themselves able to steer clear of a debt 

crisis in the first place. But even countries that did find themselves 

in heavy debt burdens have taken action to change course. 

I would like to show a chart which shows the idea of debt in the 

EU. So this isn’t something that, as a few folks have alluded to, 

this is what that looks like and how Greece is, but it is certainly 

not alone. And the concern is, we mentioned it as a moral hazard, 

that once countries realize that they are seen as too big to fail, do 

you create the hazard that people don’t change course? 

26 

I have another data point that just shows workforce participation. And this is a particularly acute problem in Greece. They are 

not the only country with this problem. But when you look at how 

few people are paying in and you look at the debt, isn’t the root 

cause just as simple as the ‘‘goes-out-tos’’ are bigger than the ‘‘goesintos?’’ And what do we see as the systemic solutions to fixing that 

problem in Greece and, frankly, if the EU is to survive as an intact 

entity, broadly? 

Ms. LUNDSAGER. I think, Congressman, that you have highlighted one of the real challenges facing the European Union, the 

eurozone in particular, which is, how to understand that, yes, they 

are all in it together. They have all benefited from having this very 

attractive euro, this currency, especially Germany because it has 

had a more depreciated currency than the Deutsche mark would 

have been had Germany stayed with a separate, individual currency. 

Yet that entails being partners with weaker countries. And how 

do you then enforce internally the kind of reforms that will bring 

more workers back into the labor force or bring debt levels down? 

And that is one thing Europe has not effectively been able to do 

internally. 

Mr. DAVIDSON. Thank you. 

And Dr. Nelson, if you could comment on that. This is a question 

that you see internationally. The IMF is supposed to be able to 

ratchet leverage with the loan, just like most creditors of last resort. If you go out into the private equity market, companies that 

find lenders of last resort find lots of warrants, clawbacks, tools 

that will effectively result in loss of control of the company. 

In a country, a country is a sovereign entity and you have this 

complexity here where you have a currency misaligned, and we 

talked about this piece. How can the IMF participate in Greece as 

part of this currency, multi-country currency agreement in the EU, 

and yet if we are to participate in the IMF apply enough teeth to 

get the reforms that the EU themselves have not been able to show 

broadly? 

Ms. NELSON. Right. I think the IMF conditionality that attaches 

to its loans has been a challenge. I think something that has come 

out from the panel is that there has been a real difference between 

the fiscal adjustment that has happened in Greece versus the 

structural problems that continue to plague Greece. 

Some of the discussions right now are on taxes, pensions, unemployment, things that have been on the table for the past 7 years 

and have been subject to IMF conditionality, but there are questions about, after 7 years, how much progress has been made and/ 

or how much progress was reasonable to expect. 

Mr. DAVIDSON. Thank you. 

My time has expired. And I just would add briefly that this is 

a challenge we are dealing with in the United States. And so as 

a participant in the IMF, the idea that the Americans are going to 

come to the rescue when we have our own crises to deal with domestically is increasingly dubious with our vote in the IMF. 

Mr. Chairman, I yield back. 

Chairman BARR. The gentleman’s time has expired. 

27 

And without objection, the subcommittee will move to a brief second round of questioning. The Chair recognizes himself for 5 minutes. 

Ms. Lundsager, you have written that not only can Europe tackle 

Greece by itself, but further IMF involvement would only postpone 

reforms in the eurozone. 

And I would ask unanimous consent to submit for the record Ms. 

Lundsager’s Reuters piece entitled, ‘‘The IMF Must Walk Away 

From Greece.’’ 

And Ms. Lundsager is not alone. I would ask unanimous consent 

to enter into the record an op-ed from February by Princeton Professor Ashoka Mody, a former deputy director of the IMF’s Research and European Departments. His piece is entitled, ‘‘The IMF 

should get out of Greece, the Fund’s involvement has been an unmitigated disaster.’’ 

The views of Ms. Lundsager and Professor Mody have been 

echoed in Europe as well. The head of ESM, Klaus Regling, said 

in an interview last year, ‘‘At this point in time, it is really not a 

question of IMF funding, but of using the IMF’s technical expertise.’’ 

Leaders in both Germany’s conservative CSU Party and left-leaning Social Democratic Party have also been quoted as saying that 

Europe can stand on its own two feet and no longer needs IMF’s 

money in Greece. 

I would also submit for the record a Reuters article from February 16th, headline, ‘‘German Conservative Euro-MP Breaks 

Ranks Over IMF Role in Greek Bailout,’’ as well as another piece, 

‘‘German SPD Says Europe Can Back Athens Without the IMF.’’ 

Without objection, it is so ordered. 

My question is as follows for Ms. Lundsager, since I quoted your 

Reuters piece. Is there any reason to believe that the IMF couldn’t 

just limit itself to a purely advisory role as opposed to a financing 

role? And if the Europeans, including Regling, are saying that it is 

IMF’s expertise that is needed in Greece as opposed to money, is 

there anything that would prevent the Fund from just providing 

monitoring and technical assistance? 

Ms. LUNDSAGER. No, and that is my preferred option. 

Chairman BARR. Yes. 

And, Dr. Nelson, it is often reported that Germany and others in 

the eurozone want the IMF in Greece because they don’t have confidence in the European Commission. As Mr. Blustein’s work has 

shown, this lack of trust among Europeans has been a running 

theme since 2010. The question would be, doesn’t taking advantage 

of the IMF in this way just let Germans and other leaders off the 

hook? 

Ms. NELSON. I think Europeans did want the IMF involved, to 

have the IMF stamp of approval that the program design would be 

sound, would be safe. However, there are questions about the cofinancing arrangement and whether or not the IMF had the independence to do what it needed to do in the program. 

Chairman BARR. And, Mr. Blustein, if the Europeans lack confidence in European institutions, isn’t it up to the Europeans to reform them? 

28 

Mr. BLUSTEIN. That is an interesting way of looking at it. I guess 

my preferred option would be something like the following. The 

IMF should be involved if it sees, using its best technocratic judgment, that the program has been fixed so that Greece’s debt is sustainable and, I agree with Meg, that it would be preferable if that 

involved a debt write-off 

But that shouldn’t just stop there by making a technocratic judgment about a specific deal that is struck in Brussels. There ought 

to be a lot of conditions imposed because the IMF’s credibility has 

been damaged by basically being dragged and, as Ashoka Mody 

wrote, its reputation affected in the process. 

One way of doing that would be to say from now on for this program and for any other, if we have to get involved in Italy, whatever, Portugal is not completely out of the woods, then from now 

on when we are lending money to a country in a currency union 

like the euro, the countries that are on the IMF board that represent those countries, they don’t get to vote, we are going to leave 

it up to the rest of the board to handle. 

And by the way, we want the members of those countries that 

are in this currency union to guarantee that the IMF will be paid 

back in full for sure if this doesn’t work out, in other words if 

Greece ends up defaulting on what it owes to the IMF, to protect 

the IMF’s preferred creditor status. 

So the way you look at it is, sure, it would be great if Europe 

could handle this problem by itself. They have understandably gone 

to the IMF and said we need your expertise. And to comfort ourselves that you are really comfortable with what we are doing, we 

want you to have some skin in the game. And that is another way 

of doing it. 

But if there is not complete comfort and if these other conditions 

can’t be met, then I would agree with Ms. Lundsager that the IMF 

should walk away. 

Chairman BARR. Thank you. 

My time has expired. And the Chair recognizes the gentleman 

from Illinois, Mr. Foster. 

Mr. FOSTER. Thank you. 

There is an amusing calculation that has, I think, been done by 

many people, that if you just go region to region around the world, 

you conclude that the world as a whole is a net debtor, which cannot mathematically occur. And so the reason, of course, is that various people are stashing money that is off the books in offshore accounts. 

And so I was wondering, what fraction of—and there are estimates, I think, for the EU as to how much money is actually 

stashed offshore. How does that compare to the total shortfall that 

you are seeing in Greece? And would that be included with estimates for the amounts stashed off the books? Is the EU and Greece 

as big a debtor as actually you would conclude from the raw numbers? Do you have any feeling for how those numbers compare as 

possible sources of money to try to settle things here? It is in the 

multiple trillions of missing offshore accounts. 

Ms. LUNDSAGER. Congressman, I don’t know the numbers, and I 

don’t have a good sense of how much it is. But clearly, as you point 

out, this is the case. The problem is governments getting access to 

29 

that, establishing the kind of policies that will bring that money 

back into the limelight, back into the sunshine so that it can be 

taxed, it can be utilized. We saw how long it took to negotiate an 

agreement with the Swiss government in terms of data and information sharing. 

Mr. FOSTER. Oh, yes, this will be politically very, very difficult. 

Ms. LUNDSAGER. Yes. 

Mr. FOSTER. In no small part because of assets that may or may 

not be held by those in power in all of the European countries. 

Ms. GELPERN. If I may add very briefly, Congressman, this is a 

multilateral problem that requires a multilateral solution. This is 

not something that the IMF can fix with Greece. And I think that 

is what Ms. Lundsager’s comment highlighted. 

Mr. FOSTER. Right. But a solution to that problem could actually 

at least be a partial solution to this. 

Ms. GELPERN. It would do the world a whole lot of good. 

Mr. FOSTER. That is right. And actually, the IMF may have a 

role in encouraging that globally. 

Another possible endpoint that various wags have pointed to is 

that the way this will all end is that German investors will each 

have their own private Greek island at the end of this, or perhaps 

a 99-year lease on a Greek island. And there is a lot of real estate 

with a very high potential market value under the control of the 

Greek government and a very big political problem even in, say, 

getting a 99-year lease that could be sold. 

But is the market value of that kind of real estate the same 

order of magnitude as the debt problem here? And is that at least 

a partial solution to this? Have there been serious efforts to make 

estimates of that? 

Ms. LUNDSAGER. Again, I don’t have the numbers at my fingertips. It could perhaps help. But if they were to try and sell it all 

at once, a fire sale, I think it would be very difficult to get the kind 

of returns that they were looking for. 

Nonetheless, in every program with Greece, the effort has always 

been to push on the privatization, the inefficient state-owned companies or even some of the better off ones, to sell them to private 

entities to raise several billion euros for the government. Between 

that and perhaps some of the real estate holdings—but any mention in Greece of selling the Parthenon or the— 

Mr. FOSTER. But large government-owned hotels, I guess, are a 

perfect example of something that would have an immediate market value. 

Ms. LUNDSAGER. Right. 

Mr. FOSTER. And those are difficult politically because they are 

paying salaries higher than would be justified by a peer-market solution? 

Ms. LUNDSAGER. That has been part of the problem, that they do 

need to get back to competitiveness. But wages and prices have 

fallen in Greece, meaning there has been some internal devaluation, which has helped make Greece a little bit more competitive. 

And, of course, tourism continues to do pretty well. But otherwise, 

the productive sector is still languishing. 

Mr. FOSTER. Mr. Blustein? 

30 

Mr. BLUSTEIN. This is one of the great mistakes the IMF made 

in the early stages of the crisis. It was actually after the first bailout, it was in the spring of 2011, that the IMF became kind of enamored of the idea that huge proceeds could be reaped by 

privatizing Greek state-owned assets. And the numbers were in the 

hundreds of billions of euros, so it was sort of concomitant with the 

size of the debt. 

One of the problems was that there were, particularly involving 

real estate, which you mentioned, Congressman, so many squatters 

who had moved into these state-owned properties that it was politically just impossible for the government, people who had built 

homes and to sort of sell that property off and evict those people 

was going to be a—and that was one of the—there were many, 

many problems that arose as— 

Chairman BARR. The gentleman’s time has expired. 

Mr. BLUSTEIN. Okay. So 50 billion was the first number that was 

used. They have ended up being able to reap about a billion euros, 

I think, maybe from privatization. 

Chairman BARR. Thank you. 

The gentleman’s time has expired. 

And finally, the vice chairman, Mr. Williams, is recognized. 

Mr. WILLIAMS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 

Earlier this month, the Slovak finance minister was reported as 

saying the amount of IMF assistance in Greece is not important. 

Instead, ‘‘It is really symbolic.’’ 

So for Dr. Nelson and Ms. Lundsager, my question would be, 

what are the implications for the IMF if its lending becomes symbolic? Wouldn’t symbolic assistance mean that the Fund is straying 

from its traditional functions? 

Ms. NELSON. The traditional function of the IMF is to lend to 

countries facing temporary balance-of-payments crises. It doesn’t 

really say anything about the amount. But I do think we have 

veered from temporary. We are 7 years into the crisis, and Greece 

is still reliant on financing. 

Mr. WILLIAMS. Ms. Lundsager? 

Ms. LUNDSAGER. Congressman, symbolic perhaps isn’t the best 

word to use because IMF participation can be very, very close in 

terms of recommendations on the policy formulation, the monetary, 

fiscal, financial sector policies, exchange rate, if needed, and then 

can be part of the team that monitors performance and assesses 

how the country is doing in meeting its fiscal targets or its inflation 

target. And IMF lending doesn’t have to be part of that at all. 

And we have seen that work pretty well with a number of lowincome countries where the IMF actually established a policy support instrument which does exactly that, has an engagement with 

the country, the country invites the IMF in, but there is no IMF 

funding included in that, it is more of a partnership. 

So absolutely, the IMF can be there. Its catalytic role used to be 

it would lend small amounts and then you would bring in other 

creditors. It doesn’t really need to lend anything if other creditors 

view the IMF assessment, its mark of good progress, as sufficient 

for them to participate. 

Mr. WILLIAMS. Okay. Just a quick follow up. So if people think 

the IMF loan is symbolic rather than necessary, how do you assess 

31 

the effectiveness of a program? And how would the Fund’s evaluation officer or anyone else for that matter evaluate symbolic lending? 

Ms. LUNDSAGER. For example, with the low-income countries, 

there is actually a board review. Staff go out for periodic reviews, 

assessments, and it comes before the IMF board. So it is, in that 

case, a formalized process. It doesn’t necessarily have to be that 

formal, but the IMF prepares all sorts of papers all the time, if 

nothing else the annual Article IV, the annual review of an economy. And that can form the basis as well for monitoring. 

But if the country invites the IMF in and asks the IMF to prepare a report, and share it with the board, and publish the report, 

then that is a way of reinforcing that role of the IMF as a designer 

of the policies and monitoring them as well. 

Mr. WILLIAMS. Ms. Nelson? 

Ms. GELPERN. Let me augment that. 

Mr. WILLIAMS. Go ahead, please. No, go ahead, that is fine. 

Ms. GELPERN. I’m sorry. The IMF’s traditional role was to support the gold exchange standard. It has evolved since its founding 

to become a big player in crises, in debt restructuring. Today, the 

task is precisely to make the Fund effective in a world where it can 

never be or it can very rarely be a huge financial player, as well 

as being effective on the regional scale. 

It did manage to go to Article IV for the eurozone. That is a good 

thing. Whether it is able to stay effective with no money or very 

little money on the line, I think, is a task for them and for us. 

Mr. WILLIAMS. Dr. Nelson? 

Ms. NELSON. I think it would be difficult to assess the symbolic 

sort of contribution of the IMF. However, I do think any sort of 

IMF involvement in a country can be judged against metrics of, is 

the country able to reenter capital markets at the conclusion of the 

program? Is the economy stabilized at the conclusion of the program? These sorts of metrics, I think, can be assessed regardless 

of the amount of money contributed. 

Mr. WILLIAMS. We only have a short time left. 

Dr. Blustein? 

Mr. BLUSTEIN. I think you have gotten brilliant answers from my 

three colleagues here. I can hardly think of anything to add to it. 

Mr. WILLIAMS. Okay. 

Mr. Chairman, I yield back. 

Chairman BARR. Thank you. And I would like to thank our witnesses for their testimony today. 

The Chair notes that some Members may have additional questions for this panel, which they may wish to submit in writing. 

Without objection, the hearing record will remain open for 5 legislative days for Members to submit written questions to these witnesses and to place their responses in the record. Also, without objection, Members will have 5 legislative days to submit extraneous 

materials to the Chair for inclusion in the record. 

And this hearing is now adjourned. 

[Whereupon, at 11:42 a.m., the hearing was adjourned.] 

(33) 

A P P E N D I X 

May 18, 2017 

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TESTIMONY TO THE SUBCOMMITTEE ON MONETARY POUCY AND TRADE 

OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES COMMITTEE ON FINANCIAL SERVICES 

"LESSONS FROM THE IMF BAILOUT OF GREECE" 

MAY 18,2017 

PAUL BLUSTEIN 

SENIOR FELLOW, CENTRE FOR INTERNATIONAL GOVERNANCE INNOVATION 
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Chairman Barr, Ranking Member Moore, Members of the 

Subcommittee on Monetary Affairs and Trade: 

I have attended many hearings on Capitol Hill as a newspaper 

reporter, but this is my first time as a witness-an honor for which I 

sincerely thank the Subcommittee. I mention this because the 

expertise I bring to the subject of this hearing is that of a journalist, 

my main research technique being extensive interviewing as well 

as examination of countless documents, both publicly available 

ones and those which remain confidential but which interviewees 

kindly furnish to me, including memoranda, notes of meetings and 

the like. This sort of material provided the basis for my book, Laid 

Low: Inside the Crisis That Overwhelmed Europe and the IMF. 

The Subcommittee's hearing on the IMF's bailout of Greece is 

welcome evidence of Congressional interest in a complex topic of 

profound importance to the future of the global economy. The 

Fund's involvement in Greece is rich in lessons about the 

workings-and failings-of the international finance system. It's a 

saga of many twists and turns, which I spell out at length in my 

book and am presenting in summarized form in this testimony. 

The phenomenon of countries laid so low by financial crises as to 

require international bailouts was once thought confined to the 

emerging world-Mexico, Thailand, and Indonesia for example. 

The euro-zone crisis showed that advanced economies may be 

equally susceptible to the vagaries of globalized finance, and may 

need rescues too. 

The importance of a muscular IMF, wielding power and authority 

commensurate with the strength of world markets, is thus greater 

than ever. The Fund, after all, is the chief guardian of global 

financial stability. By seeking to prevent financial crises from 

occurring and managing crises when they erupt, the Fund provides 

a global public good-that is, a good from which all nations broadly 

benefit and which no single nation can deliver alone. 

But the IMF's involvement in the euro zone was a bruising and 

enfeebling experience for the institution. During the euro-zone 

crisis, the Fund joined in several rescues despite grave misgivings 

among members of its Executive Board and top economic and 

legal officials-and it did so under pressure from top European 

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policymakers, who maintain heavy influence over the Fund's levers 

of control. Some of these emergency loan packages worked out 

well, but all too often debt was piled atop debt, and excessively 

harsh conditions were imposed on crisis-stricken countries. This 

approach, taken in conjunction with the Europeans, suited nations 

such as Germany and France, whose banks were anxious to stave 

off losses and whose voters were incensed at paying to bail out 

countries they perceived as irresponsible. It also suited the 

European Central Bank (ECB), because it helped preserve the 

international status of the euro and the ECB's independenceprinciples on which the central bank's leaders attach supreme 

importance. 

The approach that was taken was not entirely misplaced; it was 

based on fears that the crisis would spread, via financial 

"contagion," to the rest of Europe and elsewhere around the world. 

But the legitimate interests of the crisis-stricken countries were 

sacrificed in the process-and I believe the crisis was more 

prolonged, painful, and near-catastrophic than it ought to have 

been. Although IMF economists-to their credit-perceived 

serious flaws in these bailouts, they often yielded to the clout of 

policymakers in Berlin, Frankfurt, Brussels and Paris. Especially in 

the early years of the crisis, the Fund was relegated to the role of 

junior partner in the tripartite arrangement known as the Troika, 

which consisted of the Fund, the European Commission and the 

ECB. 

The result sapped the institution of its most precious asset-its 

credibility as an independent, neutral arbiter of how to address 

economic and financial problems in countries around the world. 

Heavy damage was thus inflicted on the IMF's ability to serve as a 

crisis-fighter and fixer of economic problems-and that raises 

concerns about the management of future crises. 

Given its weighty duties, the IMF has consistently strived to 

maintain an image as a technocratic institution, free of gross 

political interference. Although it has often fallen short, there are 

sound reasons for hewing as close as possible to the ideal. The 

Fund stands the best chance of success when, in both appearance 

and reality, it represents the interests of the world community writ 

large rather than any single power or region. In the case of 

financial emergencies, one of the Fund's primary goals is to help a 

country that has lost the confidence of investors regain access to 

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financial markets. The money the Fund lends is only a part, and 

perhaps a relatively unimportant part, of its value. Equally crucial, if 

not more so, is its seal of approval-its signification that the 

country is adopting policies conducive to economic fitness. If the 

Fund's seal of approval is severely tarnished, especially by the 

perception of manipulation by forces from on high, its effectiveness 

at restoring market confidence will be eroded. Cynicism among 

market players about the Fund's susceptibility to political meddling 

makes its job much harder-an unwelcome development at a time 

when financial crises have become so pervasive. 

The Greek crisis was where the damage was greatest, both to the 

country and to the IMF. In retrospect, Greece was saddled with an 

excessively high debt and should have gotten relief from its 

indebtedness much earlier than it eventually did. Although we will 

never know whether earlier debt relief might have made a 

difference, it seems quite reasonable to surmise that the Greek 

economy would have undergone a significantly less wrenching 

collapse than the 25% contraction in GOP that occurred between 

2008 and 2015. And in retrospect, the IMF should not have 

submitted as readily as it did to European political exigencies; 

reputation-wise, the Greek crisis has been perhaps the worst 

debacle in the Fund's history. 

In my book, I use the term "Faustian bargain" to describe how the 

IMF became involved in Greece in the spring of 2010. This bargain 

is crucial to understanding much of what happened as the crisis 

unfolded. 

THE ORIGINS OF THE IMF'S INVOLVEMENT IN GREECE 

In January 2010, a secret meeting took place in a hotel kitchen in 

Davos, Switzerland, during the annual meeting of the World 

Economic Forum. There were three participants-Dominique 

Strauss-Kahn, then the IMF's managing director; George 

Papanadreou, then the newly-elected prime minister of Greece; 

and George Papaconstantinou, who was Papandreou's finance 

minister. They met in a kitchen, with waiters bustling back and 

forth carrying trays, to make sure they wouldn't be seen by the 

many reporters who cover the Davos gathering. 

Here's the background to this meeting: Greece had borrowed its 

way into deep trouble-its government debt totaled more than 

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€300 billion, which was a bit more than the country's annual GOP. 

Worse yet, the Greek government had done so without properly 

disclosing the degree of its profligacy. The budget deficit for 2009 

was turning out to be several times higher than previously 

reported, and the ratio of debt to GOP-then estimated at 115%-

was clearly on the rise. Financial markets were worried that 

Greece would fall prey to what economists call "exploding debt 

dynamics," which refers to an ever-increasing debt-to-GOP ratio as 

higher interest rates, a sluggish economy and chronic deficits drive 

the ratio inexorably upward with the passage of time. (This 

phenomenon is analogous to an individual who, having borrowed 

an excessive amount from credit card companies, gets hit with 

much higher interest rates at the same time as his or her income 

falls, and keeps trying to borrow more until eventually being 

overwhelmed by mushrooming demands for interest and principal.) 

The nightmare scenario was that Athens would default on its debt 

obligations, leading ultimately to the country's abandoning or 

effectively being expelled from the euro zone, with hellish chaos 

certain to ensue. 

Papandreou's government was doing what any over-indebted 

entity is supposed to do-cut spending and raise income. But the 

markets were highly skeptical that Athens could or would go far 

enough, and interest rates on Greece's borrowing were soaring, 

which of course increased the threat of exploding debt dynamics. 

So Papandreou and Papconstantinou had a question for StraussKahn: Suppose Greece couldn't borrow money at anything like an 

affordable rate. Would the IMF provide the money the government 

needed to continue paying its obligations? At that point, in early 

2010, Greece's European partners-especially Germany-were 

balking at the idea of lending to Athens, on the grounds that the 

rules of the European Monetary Union contain a "no bailout" 

clause. The European position would later change, but at that point 

it appeared that Greece's only recourse might be the IMF. 

Strauss-Kahn's answer to the Greeks was not as comforting as 

they had hoped. He said that of course the IMF would try to help 

any member country requesting aid, but there were two problems: 

First, Greece would need a lot more money than the Fund alone 

could provide; and second, the Fund would not be able to provide 

a loan without the support of Europe, because European countries 

held a large (and disproportionate) share of the votes on the IMF 

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board. 

At that point, the overwhelming majority of top European 

policymakers were vehemently opposed to an IMF rescue for 

Greece. This aversion resembled the denial syndrome that afflicts 

leaders of pretty much any government facing the need for an 

international bailout. They believed that Europe could-and 

should-handle its own internal problems, and that seeking help 

from the Fund would be tantamount to admitting that their 

monetary union was weak and ineffectual. According to 

Papaconstantinou, who has written a memoir, French president 

Nicolas Sarkozy told him: "Forget the IMF. The IMF is not for 

Europe. It's for Africa-it's for Burkina Faso!" 1 

But the IMF was eager to play a part-Strauss-Kahn most of all. 

One big reason was that the world had gone for many years after 

2002 with no major financial crisis for the Fund to manage, and the 

Fund's very relevance and raison d't!Jfre had been called into 

question. The Fund had undergone a sort of existential crisis 

during this period, when it was forced to downsize its staff on the 

grounds that the need for such an institution had diminished. 

On the surface, Strauss-Kahn and other IMF officials avoided any 

comments indicating that they were pressing for a big role in 

Greece or yearning for an invitation to provide major assistance. 

Behind the scenes, however, Strauss-Kahn was doing whatever 

he could to assuage Europeans' worries and objections to IMF 

involvement, because of his anxiety to to avoid exclusion lest 

doubts arise anew about the Fund's raison d'etre. He made it clear 

that the Fund would accept a junior partner role-an almost 

unprecedented step, because in past cases when the Fund joined 

forces with other institutions and donors (such as the World Bank), 

it has played the dominant role in designing terms and conditions, 

in recognition of its expertise and status as agent of the 

international community. Only in one case, the 2008 crisis in 

Latvia, had the IMF accepted a junior partner position, putting up a 

minority of the funding and acceding to the view of European 

officials in a disagreement over Latvia's exchange rate policy. 

This is where the Faustian bargain comes in. In my interviews with 

1 George Papaconstantinou, 2016, Game Over: The Inside Story of the Greek Crisis, 

Create Space Independent Publishing Platform, Chapter 8. 

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Strauss-Kahn, he told me that he felt it would have been "lethal to 

the IMF if the Europeans would handle the crisis by themselves." 

Accordingly, he recalled telling top European Commission officials 

at a meeting in Brussels: "We [the IMF] have to be in, but you will 

be the leader." His reasoning was that the IMF would bring 

expertise and credibility to the crisis that no European institution 

could match, and to ensure that its views were taken seriously, the 

Fund would have to make some financial contribution-something 

less than 50% of a rescue loan, but well above zero. At the same 

time, the Fund could not expect to exercise the sort of total control 

over economic policy that it does in most countries because, in this 

case, it could not realistically demand policy action by the central 

bank-the ECB being the central bank for all 300 million people 

living in the euro zone, only 11 million of whom are Greek. 

As is well known, the decision about the IMF ultimately came down 

to one person-German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who effectively 

overruled Sarkozy and other European leaders at a summit in late 

March 2010. She concluded that the German Bundestag, and the 

German public, would never accept funding an emergency loan for 

Greece unless it came with severe conditions, enforced by arbiters 

with recognized neutrality and competence-and the IMF was the 

only institution that came close to this description. So the IMF was 

in, albeit on junior partner terms, which eventually were negotiated 

to mean that the Fund's contribution to the rescue loan would be 

roughly one-third of the total requirement. 

I should add in this regard that the term "junior partner" has been 

rejected by some at the IMF, including the Fund's own 

Independent Evaluation Office, as an apt description of the role the 

Fund played. 2 But I can assure you that Strauss-Kahn himself 

accepted that term in conversations with me and in emails he sent 

me. He contended, with some reason, that the IMF had little choice 

if it was to be involved at all. 

THE FIRST GREEK BAILOUT (MAY 2010) 

With the Troika having thus been constituted, missions from the 

three institutions were dispatched to Athens in mid-April 201 0, the 

aim being to negotiate what came to be known as "Plan A"-that 

2 IMF Independent Evaluation Office, 2016, "The IMF and the Crises in Greece, 

Ireland and Portugal: An Evaluation by the Independent Evaluation Office," july. 

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is, a loan of many billions of euros to restore stability by ensuring 

that Greece could avert a catastrophic default on its obligations 

coming due over the next two or three years. A huge deadline was 

looming only a few weeks away, when €8.5 billion was due on May 

19 to Greece's bondholders. So intense negotiations took place 

over a relatively short period of time, in late April and early May, 

over the terms of this loan. The result was an international bailout 

of unprecedented size. 

Of course, emergency loans of this type invariably come with 

conditions, and the toughest demands for Greece to accept 

austere policies were coming from two power centers, the German 

government and the ECB. It was perfectly reasonable to expect 

Greece to undergo substantial belt-tightening, since the country 

had essentially been living well beyond its means for some years. 

The question was how much austerity would be sensible, because 

by taking too much money out of Greek pockets, the country's 

economy-already in recession-would undergo additional 

contraction, which would be counterproductive; it would cause a 

vicious circle in which the debt-to-GOP ratio would rise, 

exacerbating fears about exploding debt dynamics. 

The IMF was commendably "dovish" in arguing within the Troika 

for a somewhat less harsh approach that would give Greece a 

couple of extra years to shrink its budget deficit. Even so, the 

rescue program was going to oblige Athens to undertake one of 

the biggest changes in budget and tax policy in history. 

Government outlays would be cut by 7% of GOP-and to put that 

into more understandable dimensions, it is a greater amount, as a 

percentage of U.S. GOP, than the our government spends on 

Social Security, Medicaid, military retirement and unemployment 

insurance combined. Tax revenues would increase by 4% of 

GOP-which is equivalent to an increase of $8,600 in the taxes 

paid by an average American family of four. 

Plainly, Greece would require measures to counter the 

recessionary impact of a tight fiscal policy, or it would fall into an 

endless downward spiral of recession and a worsening debt-toGOP ratio. Because of its membership in the euro zone, the 

country was precluded from the policies that most governments 

adopt under such circumstances-that is, pumping up the money 

supply and devaluing the currency. That left one option, namely 

structural reforms aimed at enhancing the productivity, efficiency 

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and flexibility of the economy. The Fund and European 

Commission had long been exhorting Athens to embrace such 

reforms, and now they had the leverage to impose them. These 

reforms included streamlining Greece's notoriously overstaffed 

state owned enterprises, changing labor laws that favored unions, 

and opening up professions that had long enjoyed protection from 

competition. According to Troika projections, if Greece faithfully 

adopted all of these measures, its economr would begin to recover 

in 2012, after contracting by 2.6% in 2011. 

For an idea of the skepticism about this plan that pervaded the IMF 

staff, see the confidential memo dated May 4, 2010 by Olivier 

Blanchard, then the Fund's chief economist, which I disclose in my 

book. (A copy of the most relevant portions, with key phrases 

underlined, is reproduced as Exhibit 1.) The degree of budgetary 

belt-tightening required of Greece "has never been achieved" by 

any other country, the memo warned. Furthermore, "even with fully 

policy compliance ... there is nothing that can support growth 

against the negative contribution of the public sector .... the 

recovery would likely beL-shaped, with a recession deeper and 

longer than projected." The program is thus likely to go "off track 

even with perfect policy implementation." Put in plainer English, 

this meant that even if Greece did everything being asked of it, the 

economy would sink further, because the structural reforms-no 

matter how sensible-simply wouldn't generate enough of a 

stimulatory effect. Structural reforms, after all, almost always take 

a fair number of years to generate positive effects on GOP. 

A graphical depiction (See Exhibit 2) helps make clear the grim 

implications of Blanchard's concerns. In this graph, originally 

included in a public IMF document in May 2010, the dark solid line 

shows the projected path for Greece's debt-to-GOP ratio-first 

peaking, at about 150% of GOP, then sloping back down to 

relatively sustainable levels-if all the assumptions in the program 

proved valid (that is, if Greece did everything demanded of it, and 

the economy responded as forecast.) The dotted line shows what 

would happen if just one of the major assumptions proved too 

optimistic-that is, if economic growth turned out to be one 

percentage point a year worse than projected. Under that less rosy 

scenario, the debt-to-GOP ratio wouldn't decline; it would stay very 

3 IMF, 2010, "Greece: Staff Report on Request for Stand-By Arrangement," 

Country Report No. 10/111, May. 

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high, almost certainly above sustainable levels. An even more 

explosive debt path would result if several of the assumptions went 

unmet. 

One credulity-strainer in the first Greek rescue merits particularly 

close attention. The table in Exhibit 3 shows the Troika's 

projections in 2010 for Greece's primary budget surplus (that is, 

the budget surplus excluding interest payments on government 

debt). The Troika was assuming that the Greek government would 

run a surplus of about 6% of GOP each year from 2014 to 2020. 

Obviously if Greece could achieve such a high degree of fiscal 

rectitude that would help reduce its debt-to-GOP ratio to 

sustainable levels. But such a large budget surplus entails taking 

massive amounts of money in taxes from ordinary citizens while 

putting much less back into the economy in the form of 

government spending. The assumption that a country like Greece 

could achieve such a goal year after year was absurd-and other 

assumptions were too. 

THE INTERNAL DEBATE OVER THE RESCUE 

Small wonder, given the shaky prospects for Greece to stabilize its 

debt-to-GOP ratio, that a debate was raging behind the scenes at 

the IMF about whether to try a Plan B-namely, a "haircut" for the 

country's creditors in which they would accept reduced and/or 

delayed payments of interest and principal. Fund economists were 

divided on this issue; some, especially in the European 

Department, contended that the rescue stood a decent chance of 

working if Athens fulfilled all of its promises. But others were more 

in the Blanchard camp, and in any event the Fund had a high 

standard for approving a large loan in such cases. The 

Subcommittee is well familiar with this standard, I believe-its 

formal name is the Exceptional Access Policy, but in my book I call 

it the "No More Argentinas rule," because it was implemented not 

long after the disastrous failure in 2001-2 of the Fund's rescue for 

Argentina, when the country defaulted and fell into total economic 

chaos a few months after receiving a Fund loan. Under the No 

More Argentinas rule, the IMF could make a large loan to a country 

in crisis only if rigorous analysis showed that the country's debt 

was "sustainable with high probability"; otherwise the country 

should undergo a debt restructuring. Very few people if anyone at 

the IMF believed Greece met this criterion. 

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At Strauss-Kahn's direction, high-level staffers from two 

departments that favored a Plan B-type approach (the Strategy, 

Policy and Review Department and the Legal Department) held 

secret discussions in late April 2010 with officials from the German 

and French finance ministries, in the hope of starting to lay the 

ground for a debt restructuring. As I report in my book, these 

discussions were so sensitive that they were held at a Washington 

hotel rather than in the IMF headquarters building. One reason for 

the secrecy was the concern that if word leaked, markets would go 

even more haywire than they already were. 

Equally important, any talk of a debt restructuring was drawing 

enormously powerful and vehement opposition, the most 

formidable critic being Jean-Claude Trichet, the president of the 

European Central Bank. For Trichet, who was one of the founding 

fathers of European Monetary Union, it was unthinkable that a 

euro zone country would fail to honor its debt obligations in full and 

on time. In addition to the moral issue, he feared the contagion that 

might result; once bondholders saw the debt of one euro zone 

country restructured, they would dump the bonds of other 

countries in the zone, potentially leading to a catastrophe redolent 

of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy in 2008. Advocates of Plan B 

tended to agree that such fears were reasonably well-founded, but 

their rejoinder was that countermeasures could be put into place to 

limit contagion and keep markets stable. And as we now know, the 

ECB finally took action in the summer of 2012-the so called 

"whatever it takes" strategy, technically dubbed "Outright Monetary 

Transactions"-to quell market turbulence once and for all, an 

action that pretty much ended the viral stage of the crisis. But in 

2010, the ECB was unwilling to use its money-creation powers to 

nearly such an extent. 

So it was back to Plan A-€11 0 billion in loans for Greece, 

including €30 billion from the IMF and the rest from European 

governments and institutions. Even if the secret meetings had fully 

persuaded the German and French ministry officials (which they 

didn't), opposition to Plan B from other quarters was too strong. 

Time was of the essence, given the bond payments coming due on 

May 19; in a sign of the urgency involved in getting Plan A 

finalized, the IMF board scheduled a meeting on Mother's Day, 

May 9, to approve the Fund's part of the bailout. 

This board meeting was one of the most consequential in the 

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IMF's recent memory-the loan the Fund was making to Greece, 

after all, was the largest in history, both in absolute terms and 

relative to the size of Greece's quota (contribution to the IMF's 

pool of resources). It has been known for some time, thanks to the 

leak of a memo to the Wall Street Journal, that although the board 

approved the loan to Greece based on its tradition of consensus, 

members were sharply divided and quite a few expressed deep 

reservations about the wisdom of imposing austerity on Athens 

without requiring the country's creditors to accept any losses. It is 

also well known that the board enacted a change in the No More 

Argentinas rule that was inserted into the staff report for the 

program the board was approving. 

A more recent revelation about this meeting, which is reported in 

my book and came to light with the release of the official minutes 

in 2015, 4 is that the directors didn't know about the rule change 

until the meeting was almost over, when one of them raised 

questions about some jargon-laced wording on the 19th and 20th 

pages of the staff report. So not only was the Fund breaking its 

rule, it was doing so in a manner that can charitably be described 

as fast and loose. 

THE MISSED OPPORTUNITY 

A few days after this board meeting, Strauss-Kahn summoned 

Panagiotis Roumeliotis, who served as Alternate Executive 

Director for Greece on the board, to his office, and urged him in 

confidence to convey to Athens the need for an early debt 

restructuring. This episode reflects well on Strauss-Kahn's 

perspicacity. But it also raises one of the most troubling questions 

about the Greek crisis: why wasn't a strenuous effort forthcoming 

to reduce the country's debt burden soon after May 2010, in the 

latter months of that year? 

The IMF had good reasons to avoid risking a debt restructuring 

during the spring of 2010. Substantial time would have been 

required for all the legal procedures that are involved, and failure 

by Athens to make the payments due to its creditors on May 19 

might well have led to a "Lehman moment," given the lack of an 

4 IMF, 2010, "Minutes of Executive Board Meeting 10/45-1," May 9 (published in 

the IMF Archives in July 2015). 

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adequate "firewall" to prevent contagion and other groundwork that 

would have been necessary for bondholders to accept losses. But 

suppose Strauss-Kahn had quietly told the IMF's Troika partners 

that very soon thereafter, the Fund would insist on a restructuring. 

He might have said that the Fund would simply not lend its good 

name and credibility to a plan with insufficiently high likelihood of 

leading to debt sustainability. 

Such an approach would have required confronting Europe's high 

and mighty. It presumably would have also required overcoming 

resistance from the U.S. government, which was still suffering from 

post-Lehman trauma. Although American officials were playing a 

much less dominant role in this crisis than they had in previous 

ones, the United States is the IMF's most powerful single 

shareholder, and its officials were opposed to any debt 

restructuring in the absence of a strong firewall. 

Most daunting of all would have been the face-down with Trichet. 

The ECB president was prone to umbrage when the subject of 

restructuring a euro-zone country was broached, and he had 

declared himself loath to take the kinds of monetary policy steps 

that would have been needed to limit contagion. 

In my book, I call this hypothetical scenario a "poker play that 

would have been the greatest in the history of the global 

economy." If the IMF had forged ahead with a debt restructuring, 

how might Trichet have reacted? Would he have stood his ground, 

even at the cost of risking a breakup of the currency union? Or 

would he have grudgingly used every conceivable monetary policy 

instrument to pacify market alarm? Could the IMF have called his 

bluff? 

The IMF did not attempt this audacious step because-to carry the 

poker metaphor further-its managing director believed the Fund 

would only have gotten itself expelled from the card table. As 

Strauss Kahn told me when I asked him about this imaginary 

showdown: "We were just recovering, trying to re-establish our role 

in the global system. I could play this game a little. But I couldn't 

go too far." 

THE SECOND BAILOUT OF GREECE (MARCH 2012) 

By the third quarter of 2011, with Christine Lagarde now serving as 

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IMF managing director, it was clear that Plan A was going terribly 

awry. GDP was declining much more rapidly than the Troika 

projected; the Greek economy ended the year contracting by 7.1% 

(vs. the minus 2.6% forecast), and the debt-to-GOP ratio rose to 

170% (vs. the 133% forecast). Greece was falling into exactly the 

sort of vicious cycle that had been feared in the spring of 2010. 

Was Greece fully abiding by the conditions to which it had agreed? 

No, but the main reason for the woes afflicting the Greek program 

was the counter-productive effect that fiscal austerity was having 

on an economy that had no real means of stimulating growth in the 

short term. 

A new rescue program was in the works, and within the Troika, the 

IMF was in the forefront of insisting that this time significant 

"PSI"-private sector involvement, in which Greece's bondholders 

would undergo a haircut-must be included. The final deal, 

approved in March, provided for Greece to receive the biggest 

debt relief in history. Approximately €200 billion worth of Greek 

government bonds were subject to a haircut that amounted to well 

over 50%-estimates have ranged as high as 75%, depending on 

the calculation method5-in which each €1000 of bonds would be 

exchanged for a package with €465 in face value (consisting of a 

modest amount of cash, plus new government bonds.) To 

effectuate such a deep haircut, an ingenious scheme was used 

involving collection action clauses (CACs). These clauses oblige 

all holders of a bond issue to accept the terms of a debt 

restructuring if a sufficient number agree, and the Greek 

government was able to approve legislation retroactively inserting 

the clauses into the vast majority of its bonds, which happened to 

have been issued under Greek law. 

Was this debt restructuring desirable? Absolutely, but the problem 

was that it was too little, too late. Despite all the relief Greece was 

receiving on its private debt (that is, its bonds), Athens would still 

be laboring under a huge, €300 billion-plus debt burden because 

of all the money it borrowed from the official sector (that is, 

European governments and institutions, and the IMF itself). This 

point illustrates why bailouts of unsustainably indebted countries 

can be so injurious. One major drawback is the moral hazard that 

5 Jeromin Zettelmeyer, Christoph Trebesch and Mitu Gulati, 2013, "The Greek 

Debt Restructuring: An Autopsy," Peterson Institute for International Economics, 

Working Paper 13-8, August. 

14 
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occurs when private lenders conclude they will be able to get their 

money back, courtesy of the public sector, no matter how foolish 

their loans may have been in the first place. Another problem, of 

more profound concern to citizens of the country being "rescued," 

is that debt to official bodies may be very hard to restructure, 

harder even than debt to private creditors. That is especially true 

for money owed to the IMF; the Fund enjoys "preferred creditor 

status," which means that when a country has received 

international bailout loans, the Fund must be repaid ahead of all 

other creditors. The Fund, after all, is the closest thing the world 

has to an international lender of last resort, lending to countries in 

situations where all other sources of credit have dried upmetaphorically, entering burning buildings while others are fleeing. 

This means IMF claims get top priority and countries that fail to 

repay their IMF loans can expect to be treated like international 

financial pariahs. 

Concern at the IMF about whether the second bailout would work 

is fairly evident in documents I reviewed for my book. Perhaps the 

most colorful illustration is a comment that Lagarde made when 

the broad outlines of the deal were struck at 5 a.m. on February 

21, 2012, after a grueling, all-night meeting in Brussels. As 

European officials were clapping one another on the back in relief 

over the agreement, Lagarde said: "Don't celebrate guys. In a 

couple of years, you're going to have to dig in your pockets again 

for Greece." Again, to understand such skepticism, consider the 

size of the primary budget surpluses the Greek government was 

expected to generate under this program-between 4% and 4.5% 

of GOP each year all the way until 2030, as shown in the table in 

Exhibit 4. That was less than the 6% of GOP assumed in the first 

bailout, but it was still ambitious to a ridiculous extreme. 

Internal Executive Board documents cited in my book reflect 

intense criticism at the meeting the board held on March 15, 2012, 

to approve this program. The Canadian representative at the 

meeting hit the nail on the head when he contended that Greece's 

debt should be "brought down to well below the level targeted in 

the program, through a combination of more ambitious PSI/OSI." 

By "OS I," he meant "official sector involvement"-in other words, 

acceptance by Greece's official creditors of reduction in their 

claims. But European officials were unwilling to go far in that 

direction; although they accepted lower interest payments and 

postponements in maturities on the debt Greece owed them, they 

15 
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refused to accede to outright forgiveness of the loans they had 

extended to Athens-a position they have continued to staunchly 

maintain. 

THE LATTER STAGES OF THE CRISIS AND THE THIRD 

BAILOUT OF GREECE 

It is important to note that, although the IMF deserves criticism for 

bowing to European pressure, it deserves credit for standing up to 

Europe on a number of occasions, especially during the period 

starting in the latter half of 2011 after Lagarde became managing 

director. In August of that year, Lagarde gave a speech 

questioning whether European banks were adequately capitalized, 

which infuriated leading officials in the region. In October 2012, 

analysis issued by the Fund's Research Department, which 

Blanchard directed, sharply challenged the prevailing European 

orthodoxy favoring austerity for dealing with crises. In the spring of 

2013, when Cyprus underwent a crisis, the IMF succeeded in 

overcoming European resistance to an approach that Fund 

officials favored. Although this victory wasn't quite as impressive 

as has been portrayed in the news media-an approach the IMF 

would have preferred even more for dealing with Cyprus was 

rejected by Europe, as my book reveals-it is fair to say that the 

Cypriot crisis was one of several examples of the Fund taking a 

considerably tougher and more independent stance than it had 

before. 

Perhaps the most salient illustration of the IMF's increasing 

assertiveness was the drama that unfolded in 2015 when a radical 

leftist government came to power in Athens. During this period, the 

IMF was often credited, justifiably, with playing the role of "honest 

broker" between Greece and its European creditors-that is, 

demanding far-reaching reforms from the Greeks while 

simultaneously insisting that Europe accept debt relief that would 

put Athens on a sustainable path. For example, when European 

finance minsters met in Riga, Latvia in late April 2015-an episode 

that was widely depicted as a massive ganging-up on Greek 

finance minister Yanis Varoufakis-Poul Thomsen, the director of 

the Fund's European Department, said, according to notes of the 

meeting: "I want to caution you, ministers ... very significant debt 

relief will be necessary ... do not be surprised when this will come." 

Fund documents issued during the tense standoff between Athens 

and Europe in the summer of 2015 provided laudably candid 

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assessments about the dimensions of the debt problem. And when 

Greece's left-wing government capitulated to European pressure in 

July 2015 by accepting yet another harsh rescue package, the IMF 

finally refused to go along, stating that it would join only after a 

plan was agreed that would assure reductions in the debt burden 

in more realistic accord with the country's ability to pay. 

It would be misleading, however, to attribute these developments 

to the change in IMF leadership in mid-2011. Tempting as it is to 

conclude that the dauntless Lagarde showed more gumption than 

the crafty Strauss-Kahn, the crucial factor was the different 

position the IMF found itself during the months after Lagarde's 

arrival. In contrast to the situation in 2010, when Strauss-Kahn was 

struggling to ensure that the Fund would play a role in the crisis, 

Europe was far more anxious during the period starting in late 

2011 to keep the Fund involved. This was the time when Europe's 

need for Fund involvement-both its money and its credibilitywas at its peak, and so was the Fund's leverage. 

Commendable as the IMF's frankness was in 2015 regarding 

Greek debt sustainability, I believe the Fund should have been 

tougher regarding the country's official debt-and acted sooner. It 

should have exploited the greater leverage that it had to better 

advantage. 

Consider in this regard the strong public statements that Fund 

officials have made in the past couple of years concerning 

Greece's primary budget surplus. In mid-2015, an IMF document 

derided European expectations that Athens could maintain a 3.5% 

of GDP surplus over the medium term, noting that "few countries 

have managed to do so."6 In April2016, Lagarde declared at a 

press conference: "What we find highly unrealistic ... is the 

assumption that this primary surplus of 3.5% can be maintained 

over decades. That just will not happen."7 

Lagarde was absolutely right, and she should be applauded for 

speaking out. Yet recall that the IMF went along with much bigger 

long-term primary surplus targets, both in the first and second 

bailouts. Why did it take so long for the Fund to deem these 

6 IMF, 2015, "Greece: An Update of IMF Staffs Preliminary Public Debt 

Sustainability Analysis," Country Report 15/186, july 14. 7 IMF, 2016, "Press Briefing of the Managing Director," April14. 

17 
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targets to be economically and socially unattainable? A charitable 

answer would go as follows: Only later in the crisis did the Fund 

gain sufficient insight into the Greek political system to see how 

misplaced its confidence was in the attainability of those targets, 

and only then could the Fund act resolutely in the face of 

European resistance. A less charitable answer-which I believe is 

more apt-is that the IMF took too long, both for Greece's stake 

and its own, to muster sufficient pluck. 

CONCLUSIONS 

Christine Lagarde has restored the IMF's luster and enhanced its 

public profile since taking over after the sordid episode of May 

2011 that led to Strauss-Kahn's resignation. Indeed, she enjoys 

enormous admiration and popularity; her pronouncements on all 

manner of issues routinely receive respectful attention worldwide. 

She mobilized a major boost in the IMF's financial resources from 

member countries, and was a shoo-in for a second term in 2016 

after serving her first five-year term, with unanimous and 

enthusiastic support of the Fund's board. When she appeared on 

The Daily Show in 2015, the studio audience welcomed her with 

wild applause as she bantered with host Jon Stewart-a public 

relations tour de force that would have boggled the minds of Fund 

press officers back in the day of her staid predecessors. 

At a time when the managing director is held in such high esteem, 

concern about the IMF's place in the world might seem 

incongruous. But all the bon mots in the world cannot erase the 

more substantive developments involving the Fund's role in 

Europe both before and after Strauss-Kahn's departure, nor the 

harm that resulted. 

One word aptly describes the IMF's role as junior partner in the 

Troika: travesty. The arrangement struck in the spring of 2010 was 

an original sin that led to many others. Even though the Fund was 

putting up a minority share of the loan package for Greece, it 

should have participated as senior partner, with the power to 

determine the terms and conditions of the rescue, based on an 

understanding that it would consult European policy makers 

without being obliged to defer to them or reach compromises with 

them. 

This is not to say that compromise between the IMF and major 

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shareholders is necessarily bad; the Fund is a political institution at 

the end of the day, with a management and staff accountable to 

the board that represents the member countries. The Fund has 

been obliged to reach some sort of accommodation with major 

industrial countries in virtually every crisis it has confronted-one 

famous example being the role played by U.S. Treasury and 

Federal Reserve officials during the Asian crisis of the late 1990s. 

But in the euro-zone crisis, the line separating legitimate influence 

from harmful interference was not only crossed, it was trampled 

on. From the standpoint of the IMF's integrity, the control that 

Europeans exerted in the euro-zone crisis posed a different and 

much more harmful threat than that of U.S. officials during 

previous crises. Unlike the United States, European nations were 

borrowing from the Fund. Even the rich European countries that 

never needed IMF aid were in many respects supplicants, using 

the Fund-both its seal of approval and its money-to save their 

terribly flawed system of money union. Not only were policy 

makers from these rich European countries desperate to protect 

the euro, they were aiming at the same time to ensure their 

political survival; they were concerned about placating angry, fedup electorates. For Europeans to be pushing the Fund around 

under such circumstances was an affront to robust multilateralism. 

When it came to the euro zone, therefore, the Europeans should 

not have been "the leaders," as Strauss-Kahn put it in his meeting 

with them in the spring of 201 0; the working assumption all along 

should have been the opposite. Ideally, the Fund should have 

gotten even more clout, in the form of what I call "super senior" 

partnership-that is, the authority to set terms and conditions for 

the entire euro zone. Under the Troika arrangement, the Fund was 

sitting on the same side of the negotiating table as the ECB, but it 

should have sat on the opposite side, and it should have had the 

power to require action from all of the member countries, not just 

the ones urgently in need of international assistance. As just 

noted, the Fund was coming to the rescue of the euro; if the 

countries using that currency were not willing to take the steps that 

the Fund believed necessary, they of course had the right to 

refuse. But the Fund had the right, and arguably the duty, to tell 

the Europeans they would then to be left to their own devices. 

This is not to imply that the IMF is endowed with such brilliant 

insight that it can be assured of diagnosing every international 

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economic and financial problem accurately and prescribing optimal 

policies. Quite the contrary, my book provides extensive evidence 

showing how the Fund often makes faulty assessments-for 

example, the Fund completely failed to foresee vulnerabilities in 

Europe prior to the crisis. But the case for the Fund exercising 

supreme authority in financial crisis situations should be based not 

on its infallibility (which it clearly does not have), but on its 

independence, objectivity, and global perspective. In other words, 

although the Fund cannot credibly claim to have superior wisdom 

regarding each and every crisis that comes along, it should be in a 

position to assert that its analysis must take priority by dint of its 

status as a multilateral institution entrusted by the international 

community to exercise neutral, objective judgment about the best 

possible resolution. 

The question is what the IMF ought to do now to undo, or at least 

mitigate, the damage done to its credibility and effectiveness in 

future crises. 

Nobody can foresee with any degree of certainty where the next 

crisis will arise-perhaps it will be Asia, or Latin America. But when 

it happens, powerful countries may insist that the IMF play a junior 

partner role again, based on the precedent set in Europe. They 

may wish to use the IMF to endorse their view of how matters 

should be handled, possibly for narrow reasons of national interest 

(protecting their big banks from taking severe losses, for example). 

Although the euro zone is sui generis to some extent, as the only 

major region of the world with a currency union, that does not 

mean the problem that arose there with regard to the IMF's role 

could not happen elsewhere. 

Regional financial institutions and ad hoc arrangements among 

countries are on the rise, one motive being to create alternatives to 

the IMF or at least influential adjuncts to it. The most recent of 

these is the BRICS countries' $100 billion Contingency Reserve 

Arrangement (CRA), a pool of currencies intended "to forestall 

short-term balance of payments pressure, provide mutual support 

and further strengthen financial stability." Although entities such as 

the CRA will never supplant the IMF, it is not hard to imagine that, 

in a crisis, they could be used to help tilt the terms of rescue 

packages in directions that suited major countries' governments, 

against the Fund's best judgment. Such an approach would erode 

the IMF's value as a global public goods provider, which would be 

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to the long-term detriment of all. 

In the final chapter of my book, I list a host of policy 

recommendations aimed at addressing the problems I have cited. 

These proposals include changes in IMF governance and the 

establishment of a new Fund facility for handling countries in need 

of debt restructuring. This portion of the book is the least valuable; 

many people with greater expertise than I have on these issues 

are more qualified to figure out how to fix the system. As a 

journalist whose competitive advantage lies in reporting and writing 

a narrative, I like to fancy that I have provided an accurate 

chronicle of events that will be useful to informing the public 

debate. 

Whatever remedies are adopted, they should fully take on board 

the extent of the IMF's misadventures in Greece. Only then will the 

Fund stand a decent chance of providing global public goods of 

the sort the world needs. 

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EXHIBIT 1 

0 

22 
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EXHIBITZ 

Source: IMF, 2010, "Greece: Staff Report on Request for Stand-By Arrangement," 

Country Report No. 10/111, May. 

EXHIBIT 3 

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2014 2015 2020 

Source: IMF, 2010, "Greece: Staff Report on Request for Stand-By Arrangement," 

Country Report No. 10/111, May. 

EXHlBIT4 

as of Nov. 2012 

Source: !MF, 2012, "Greece: Request for Extended Arrangement Under the 

Extended Fund Facility-Staff Report," Country Report No. 12/57, March; and 

IMF, 2013, "Greece: First and Second Reviews Under the Extended Arrangement 

Under the Extended Fund Facility," Country Report No. 13/20, January. 

24 
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27420.025

Testimony before the 

Subcommittee on Monetary Policy and Trade 

Committee on Financial Services 

U.S. House of Representatives 

May 18,2017 

AnnaGelpem 

Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center 

Non-resident Senior Fellow, Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics 

Introduction 

Chairman Barr, Ranking Member Moore, and Members of the Subcommittee, thank you 

for the opportunity to testify before you on the evolving role of the International Monetary Fund 

("IMF" or the "Fund .. ) in sovereign debt crises. and the implications of its involvement in Greece. 

In my research on sovereign debt management and financial crises, the IMF has emerged as a 

central element of the global crisis response and restructuring framework. It is fair to say that the 

Greek crisis has tested it like no other. The TMF has teamed from this experience, and has adapted 

its policies in response to criticism--just as it had in the 1980s and 1990s-so that it remains an 

indispensable part of the sovereign debt restructuring regime today. I believe that a strong and 

independent IMF is very much in the U.S. interest and, on balance, in the interest of the citizens 

of crisis-stricken countries. Of course, there is scope for retonn. 

My testimony today will outline the sovereign debt restructuring context, focusing on the 

role of the IMF, summarize my view of recent restructuring experience, focusing on Greece, and 

offer reform suggestions.' Sovereign debt restructuring reform should have three objectives, 

addressing both the perennial flaws in the prevailing regime and new challenges to it. First, 

the reformed regime should achieve sustainable outcomes generally accepted as fair. It 

should deliver a fresh start for debtors and finality for creditors, and treat similarly situated 

debtors and creditors alike. Second, to that end, the restructuring process should be 

comprehensive and collective. Third, the sovereign debt restructuring regime should be 

intelligible and accountable to all stakeholders. While overnight transformation is not in the 

·Portions of this testimony are based on my article, Sovereign Debt: Now Whal?, which appeared in a special issue 

of the Yale International Law Journal in 2016. 
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27420.026

cards, even partial and incremental changes should be evaluated based on how well they 

advance the three objectives. 

Sovereign debt restructuring reform is not all about the IMF, but it cannot happen 

without the IMF. 

• With respect to the first objective, sustainability. the IMF has already moved to reform its 

approach to assessing countries' debt burdens, and to open up its methodology to outside 

scrutiny. In Europe, the IMF has been a force for good-despite its own repeated 

embarrassments-pushing EU authorities to be more realistic in their projections even 

in the face of political constraints. Nonetheless, I continue to believe that there is much 

to be gained from opening the sustainability debate further to competing views. 

• As to the second objective, comprehensive and collective process. the IMF is literally the 

only institution in the world today with capacity to bring together diverse stakeholders 

in a sovereign debt crisis, including private and other official creditors. The Fund's 

lending policies are a source of considerable leverage in this area. I am especially gratified 

by the IMF's engagement with the changing role of official creditors in recent years. The 

position of the European Central Bank ("ECB") in the 2012 Greek debt restructuring, the 

still-dominant role of government creditors in Greece today, and a recent bondholder 

lawsuit against Ukraine, brought on Russia's behalf in London, all illustrate the 

magnitude of the enduring challenge. 

• Finally, the JMF is ideally positioned to promote more transparency, intelligibility, and 

accountability in sovereign debt restructuring. It has the technical and political tools to secure 

consistent, comprehensive, and publicly accessible disclosure of debt restructuring results, 

including both legal and financial terms. There is simply no reason for this information, which 

is of utmost public importance, to be the exclusive province of academic sleuths (including 

many of my colleagues and dear friends) on whom we now rely. 

The IMF is in a peculiar position today. Unless it receives a massive funding boost, it will 

stay small relative to the scale of global capital flows. Yet its knowledge, experience, and political 

clout remain far in excess of its financial might. The !MF's role in Greece today is a case in point. 

This is precious capital. It is in everyone's interest to protect and fortify it for the crises to come. 

I. The Sovereign Debt Context 

A. No Fresh Start, Weak Enforcement 

When a government cannot pay its bills, it cannot file for bankruptcy. There is no court, no 

authoritative body to declare that a state is insolvent, to bring all the stakeholders together in a 

restructuring plan, or to shield its assets from seizure by opportunistic creditors while everyone 

2 
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works out a compromise to put the country on the road to recovery. To be sure, many govemments 

are leery of bankruptcy: they do not want to submit to a binding process beyond their control. I 

But without bankruptcy, there is also no debt discharge, no fresh start as a matter of right. 

Sovereign debt is literally forever. 

Governments do have the protection of sovereign immunity.2 Most of the sovereign 

debtor's assets are inside its borders; those that are not, such as embassies and military 

bases, are shielded from seizure. Short of gunboats, there are few ways for creditors to make 

governments pay. 3 However, creditors can make life plenty difficult for sovereigns by trying 

to cut off their sources of funding and disrupting their international financial transactions.4 

This requires creditors to stick together, which is no small task without a bankruptcy 

backstop. 

Sovereign borrowing and restructuring are a function of this tension: the debt is hard 

to enforce, but it never goes away. In practice, debt restructuring has come from bargaining 

between a government and its creditors. However, it often takes many years, and brings 

insufficient relief. 

Lengthy debt crises bring deadweight losses (they are inefficient), but they also 

disproportionately hurt the poorest, least sophisticated debtors and creditors. ; These 

ultimate stakeholders of any sovereign debt restructuring regime-citizens, taxpayers, bank 

depositors and pensioners-lose their livelihoods along with their faith in domestic and 

international institutions. 6 Governments lose their capacity to meet the basic human needs 

of their citizens and to safeguard their human rights. 

1. See, e.g., Sean Hagan, Designing a Legal Framework to Restructure Sovereign Debt, 36 GEO . .J. INT'L L. 

299, 346-47,352, 391 n. 250 (2005); Jerome Sgard, /low the IMF Did lt~Sovereign Debt Restructuring Between 1970 and 1989, II CAP. MKTS. L.J. 103 (2016). 

2. For canonical accounts of the enforcement challenge and its implications, see Jonathan Eaton & Mark Gersovitz, Debt with Potential Repudiation: T1.teoretical and Empirical Analysis, 48 REV. ECON. S11JDIES 289 (1981) 

(reputation); .Jeremy Bulow & Kenneth Rogoff Sovereign Debt: Is to Forgive to Forset, 79 AM. ECON. REv. 43 (1989) and Jeremy Bulow & Kenneth Rogoff, A Constant Recontracting Model of Sovereign Debt, 97 J. POUT. ECON. 155 ( 1989) (enforcement); MICHAEL TOMZ, REPUTATION AND INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION: SOVEREIGN DEBT AC'ROSS fiiREE CENTURIES (2007) (reputat10n). 

3. W. Mark C. Weidemaier, Sovereign Immunity and Sovereign Debt, 2014 U.ll.L. L. REV. 67 (2014); Pierre- Hu~ues Verdier & Erik Voeten, How Does Customary International Law Change? The Case of State Immunitv, 59 !NT l. SmD. Q. 209 (2014). , 

4. See LEE C. BUCHHEIT ET AL., BROOKINGS lNST., COMM. ON INT'L ECON. POL'Y & REFORM, REVISITING SOVEREIGN BANKRUPTCY (2013) (follow "Download the full report" hyperlink under "Download") [hereinafter 

REVISlTING SOVEREIGN BANKRUPTCY]. 

5. See, e.g., FEDERICO Sl1JRZENEGGER & JEROMIN ZETrELMEYER, DEBT DEFAULTS AND LESSONS FROM A DECADE OF CRISES 50-53 (2006) (summarizing economic literature on deadweight losses from sovereign debt default); Peter Fallon & Robert Lucas, The Impact of Financial Crises on Labor Markets, Household Incomes, and Poverty: A Review of Evidence, 17 WORLD BANK RES. OBSERVER 21, 21-45 (2002); 2 Jeffrey D. Sachs, Introduction to DEVELOPING COUNTRY DEBT AND ECONOMIC PERFORMANCE: COUNTRY STUDIES-ARGENTINA, BOLIVIA, BRAZIL MEXICO 19-24 (Jeffrey D. Sachs ed., 1990)(describing the distributional effect of debt crises). ' 

6. Cf. Armin von Bogdandy & Matthias Goldmann, Sovereign Debt Restructuring,\· as Exercises of 

international Public Authority: Towards a Decentralized .)()vereign fnsolvency Lmv, in SOVEREIGN FfNANCING ANb 

INTERNATIONAL LAW: THE UNCTAD PRINCIPLES ON RESPONSlllLE SOVEREIGN LENDING AND BORROWING 39 (Carlos 

Esposito, Yuefen Li & Juan Pablo Bohoslavsky eds., 20!3) (arguing that the effects of sovereign debt restructuring 

3 
61 


27420.028

B. The Sovereign Debt Restructuring Regime and the JMF, a Brief History 

To structure bargaining without bankruptcy, a set of interlocking institutions and nonns 

emerged late in the twentieth century. This informal regime has been anchored in institutions 

dominated by the Group of Seven (G-7) wealthy nations/ and has continued to evolve. All along, 

it drew criticism for failing to deliver enough relief or fair distribution; it prevailed nonetheless in 

good part because "[f!or 30 years sovereign debt restructurings have gotten done.'' 8 New patterns 

of capital flows and political realignments have challenged the sovereign debt restructuring regime 

from the moment it came together in the mid-1990s. Recent debt crises, including the crisis in 

Greece, have exposed more perennial failures and new shortcomings. 

Changes in international trade and capital movements, the decline of absolute sovereign 

immunity, post-colonial and post-Soviet upheavals each periodically called for new debt 

management and restructuring tools, and forced the old ones to adapt. Growth in bilateral trade 

finance from the rubble of World War 11 created demand for coordination among government-togovernment creditors. The Paris Club, a regular informal gathering of official bilateral creditors, 

was born in the 1950s. 9 The 1970s saw a spike in syndicated loans to poor and middle-income 

countries, made by banks in major financial centers. The crises and restructurings that followed in 

the 1980s required a mechanism to coordinate commercial banks. Bank advisory committees, or 

the London Club process, emerged in response. 10 G-7 finance officials were just backstage with 

moral suasion, funding and regulatory incentives, because the health of their financial systems 

depended on the success of the process: banks took nearly a decade to build up enough capital and 

reserves to absorb losses from debt reduction. 11 Meanwhile, sovereign debt kept growing. 12 

fall on the public and should be governed by public law). 

. 7. The Group of Seven (G-7) comprises Canada, France, Genmny, llaly, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the 

Umted States. 

8. Lee C. Buchheit, Sovereign Debt Restmcturings: !he Legal Context, in SOVEREIGN RISK: A WORLD 

WITHOUT RJSK-FREE ASSETS? B!S PAPERS NO. 72 l 07, 110 (July 20 13). http://www.bis.org/publlbppdflbispap72.pdf. For evidence that debt relief comes too late and delivers too little relief. see Rodrigo Mariscal et al. 7 Soven.!f(1!J.. 

Defaults: Cun:t:,nt Svsfe!J} Resulted i!1I!l.:5.l#Jg_{l?i.'J..Soluti~_l (Escuela de Negocios: Oniversidad Torcuat~i Tella, W er 03/2015, 2015); REVISITING SDvEREIGN BANKRUPTCY, supra note 4, at 5-14; Elena Duggar, 

Sovereign . Series: The Aftermath of Sovereign Defaults, Moody's (Oct. 2013); Udaibir S. Das. MichaefG. 

Papaioannou & Christoph Trebesch~ So\:§[£jgn)Jeht Re,ytructurings 195{)-20 I 0: _lA(erullu:_e Surrqy. DqiJJ, wu.f_Jitr./i::ed Facts (lMF, Working Paper No. WP/121203, 20 12). 

9. THOMAS M. CALLAGllY, TilE MISUNDERSTOOD ORIGINS OF 'll!E PARIS CLUB (2008) (unpublished manuscript) (on file with author). 

10. Jose Antonio Ocampo traces some of the same history, with an emphasis on the booms and busts in different 

forms of lending to sovereigns, but argues that the accretion of institutions to restructure sovereign debt to different 

creditors resulted in a "non-system." Jose Antonio Ocampo. A Brief' llistorv of Sovereign Debt Resolution and a 

Proposal (or a Multilateral Instrument. in TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE: T!iE QUESTT(\ RESOLVE SOVI'REIGN DEBT CRISES 

189-195 (MARTIN GUZMAN, JOSE ANTONIO OCAMPO & JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ, EDS., 2016). See also, LEX RIEFFEL, 

RESllUJCTIJRING SOVEREIGN DEBT: TilE CASE FOR AD-HOC MAC!f!NERY 95-131 (2003) (describing the London Club 

process). 

II. WILLIAM R. CLINE, INTERNATIONAL DEBT REEXAMINED 72-73 (1995) (describing changes in the financial 

position of banks and developing country debt stocks throughout the 1980s); Ocampo. supra note 10; RIEFFEL, supra note 10. See also, JOSEPH KRAFT, THE MEXICAN REsnJE (1984) (a journalistic account of the early days ofthe Third 

World Debt Crisis and the bank coordination process). For a description of sovereign debt restructunng as a threeparty negotiation including the debtor, the creditor, and creditors· governments, see Jeremy Bulow & Kenneth Rogoff, Multilateral Negotiations for Rescheduling Developing Country Debt: A Bargaining-lheoretic 1·/·amework, 35 JMF STAFF PAPERS 644 (1988). 

12. Cl.!NE, supra note II. 

4 
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27420.029

Starting in 1989, banks exchanged unpayable loans for tradable bonds at a discount. 

Developing countries reduced their debt to foreign banks by a third or moreY Bonds quickly 

eclipsed loans as the funding instrument of choice for sovereigns, as they had been in the late 

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 14 Defaults returned to the sovereign bond market in the 

late 1990s, and called for bondholder coordination. 15 Designing the right coordination machinery 

was a challenge because late twentieth-century bonds traded more widely and actively than their 

ancestors, and because modem-day bondholders did not normally have enduring ties to 

governments. Creditor committees, which had led bond restructuring negotiations a century earlier 

and commercial bank negotiations a decade earlier, have played a limited role in contemporary 

bond exchanges. For the most part in the late 1990s and early 2000s, debtors and their advisers 

drove distressed sovereign bond exchanges, which resembled new securities offerings more than 

the deals brokered by bank advisory committees or bondholder councils ofyore. 16 

Chronically poor countries cut off from private markets borrowed instead from 

governments and multilateral institutions such as the IMF, the World Bank, and regional 

development banks. Many of the economic reform and development programs financed with 

foreign official credits failed to deliver thanks to some combination of bad design, bad 

implementation, and bad luck. By the late 1990s, some countries' debts had grown and their 

economies had deteriorated so much that stretching out repayments (rescheduling) and even 

substantial debt reduction by Paris Club creditors could not put them on a sustainable path: their 

debts would keep growing in perpetuity. ln response to a global civil society campaign, the G-7 

unveiled new dedicated debt relief programs, the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) 

initiative in 1996 and the Multilateral Debt Relieflnitiative (MDRI) in 2005. Throughout the 1990s 

and into the 2000s, a mix of outside pressure, creditor country politics, new research and policy 

experience prompted a succession of program changes to deliver more relief in exchange for more 

reform. Multilateral debt of the world's poorest countries eventually would be cut for the first time 

alongside bilateral debt, with debt reduction tied to policy and governance conditionality. 17 

13. See, e.g., Serkan Arslanalp & Peter Blair Henry, Is Debt Reli~fEfjicient?, 60 J. Fin. 1017 (2005). 

14. Ross Buckley, The Facilitation of the Brady Plan.· Emerging Markets Debt Trading f/·om 1989/o 1993, 

2! FORDHAM INT'LLJ. 1802, 1804-18, 1820-22 (1997). 

15. Udaibir S .. Das, Michael G. Papaioannou & Christoph Trebcsch, Restructuring SovereignDebt: Lessons from Recent H1stm;v, m FINANCIAL CRJSES: CAUSES, CONSEQUENCES. AND POLICY RESPONSES 593 (Stun Claessens et al. eds., 2014). 

16. For accounts ofbondholder committees in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Marc Flandreau, 

S'overeign States, Bondholders Committees, and the London Stock Exchange in the Nineteenth Centw;v (1827-68): New Facts and Old Fictions, 29 OXFORD REv. ECON. POL 668 (2013); and Rory Macmillan, Towards a Sovereign 

Debt Work-out System, 16 Nw. J. lNT'L L. & Bus. 57 (1995). On the development of contemporary sovereign bond 

restructuring practices, see NOURJEL ROUB!Nl & BRAD SETSER, BAILOUTS OR BAIL-INS? RESPONDING TO FINANCIAL 

CRISES IN EMERGING ECONOMIES 2004 ; STURZENEGGER & ZETIELMEYER, supra note 3; Ran Bi, Marcos Chamon 

& Jeromin Zettelmeyer, The 'asn 't: Coordination Failures in Soverei n Debt Restructurin s (IMF, 

Working Paper No. WP/11/ , _ anizza, Federico Sturzenegger & Jeromm Zette1meyer, The Economics and /.aw qfSovereign Debt and Defau ECON. LIT. 651 (2009). -

17. Technically, the debt was paid off on the debtors' behalf by donor countries. Martin A. Weiss. The 

Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative, CRS Report No. 22534 (Jun. 11, 2012), Martin A Weiss, Debt Relief for Heavily 

Indebted Poor Countries: Issues for Congress, CRS Report No. RL33073 (Apr. 18, 2006); NANCY BIRDSALL & JOHN 

WILLIAMSON, DELIVERING ON DEBT RELIEF: FROM !MF GOLD TO A NEW AID ARCHO'EC'IURE(2002); JMF, Factsheet: 

The Multilateral Debt Relieflnitiative (updated Sep. 17, 2015); IMF, Factsheet: Debt Relief Under the Heavily 

5 
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Different fora, practices, and techniques-the Paris and London Clubs, bond exchanges, 

H!PC and MDRI-could be mixed and matched to suit particular debtors, creditors, and debt 

stocks. By the late 1990s, sovereign debt restructuring was the work of a reasonably integrated 

regime, even if it was not recognized as such. 

The IMF established itself as the foundation of this restructuring regime beginning in the 

1980s. 18 It delivered temporary liquidity for the debtor and used its lending instruments and 

policies to nudge disparate creditor groups to coordinate. By the tum of the century, this role was 

well-understood by a small core of repeat players: finance officials in debtor and creditor countries, 

staff and management at multilateral institutions, experts at credit rating agencies, big law and 

financial firms, and smaller, specialized investors. 19 A country that could not pay its debt first 

turned to the !MF, which typically offered financial support for up to three years, conditioned on 

economic reform. 20 The IMF indicated what budget savings the country could achieve, which 

implied a "financing gap" to be filled by new lending and debt relief from other creditors. By 

default, the IMF also became a gatekeeper: if the gap could not be filled, the program could not go 

forward. Without IMF funding. the country and its creditors faced the prospect of disorderly 

defaulL21 

For debtors and creditors, there were few good alternatives to negotiation. Throughout the 

1980s and 1990s, national courts chipped away at sovereign borrowers' defenses to paying their 

debts. 22 Yet most government property remained beyond creditors' reach, either safe inside 

debtors' borders or covered by still-potent central bank, military and diplomatic immunities.23 

Governments that could not or would not pay their foreign creditors had to choose between 

Indebted Poor Countries (H!PC) Initiative (updated Sept. 17, 2015), 

http://www.imf.org/cxternal/np/exr/facts/hipc.htm; Joshua Busby, Is There a Constituency for Global Poverty? 

Jubilee 200(1 and the Future <if Development Advocacy, in GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT 2.0: CAN PiliLANTIIROPISTS, TilE 

PUBLIC AND THE POOR MAKE POVER1Y HISTORY? 85 (Lael Brainard & Derek Chollet eds., 2008). 

18. Sgard puts the start of this role for the IMF in the 1970s; it developed more fully during the Third World Debt Crisis in the 1980s. Sgard, supra note 1. 

19. See Anna Gelpem & Mitu Gulati, Public Symbol in Private Contract: A Case Study, 84 WAS!!. U. L. REv. 1627 (2006) (an interview-based study of sovercion bond contract reform, describing different parts of the sovereign 

debt restructuring community); Mm1 GULATI & RoBERT E. ScmT, THE 3 l/2 MINUTE TRANSACTION: BoiLERPLATE AND T!IE LIMITS OF CONTRACT DESIGN (2012) (describing and interviewing lawyers in New York and London); ':f YVES DEZALAY & BRYANT G. GARTH, DEALING IN V!RHJE: INTERNATIONAL COMMERCIAL ARBITRATION AND TilE CONSTRUCTION OF A TRANSNATIONAL LEGAl. ORDER 10 (1996) (describing the tightly-knit international arbitration commumty). 

20. Lee Buchheit, 1he Role of the Official Sector in Sovereign Debt Workouts, 6 CIIL J. INT'L L 333 (2005). 

21. !d. at 341-42. Buchheit points out that this JMF role was not well understood by the private sector. While 

this may have been true of the private sector in general or investor groups new to the sovereign debt restructuring 

scene, it was not true of insiders like him, who numbered in the dozens. Supra note 24. Ocampo argues that outright defaults in the interwar p~riods led to better economic outcomes for the borrowing countries than the managed 

restructurmg process descnbed here. Ocampo. supra note 10. 

22. For U.S. jurisprudence, see, for example, Argentina v. Weltover, Inc., 504 U.S. 607 (1992) (U.S. courts 

have jurisdiction over domestic-law bonds payable in New York; debt issuance is commercial activity outside the scope of sovereign immunity); Allied Bank Jnt'l v. Banco Credito Agricola de Cartago, 757 F.2d 516 (2d Cir. 1985) 

(eliminatin1> the Act of State Doctrine as a defense to sovereign default); and Elliott Assocs. v. Banco de Ia Nacion, 194 F. 3d 3o3 (2d Cir. 1999) (effectively eliminating the champerty defense in sovereign debt). 

23. The "ARA Libertad" Case (Argentina v. Ghana), Case No. 20, Order of Dec. 15,2012, 12 ITLOS Rep. 332. 

6 
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compromise and a lifetime of hiding assets and rerouting payments, which made it hard to pursue 

international trade and finance. 24 Meanwhile, creditors with judgments against sovereigns could 

spend years scouring the world for morsels of attachable property and hassling debtors into 

settlement. A scant few could play this game; hardly anyone else found it appealing. 25 

The sovereign debt restructuring regime at the tum of the century had features that helped 

it manage sovereign debt distress to survive in a world without statutory, court-supervised 

bankruptcy, robust contract enforcement, or strong shared norms. First, creditors with similar 

interests, legal entitlements and constraints stuck together; each group followed a distinct 

restructuring process reflecting its particular attributes and relationship with the debtor. Second. 

groups of creditors--official bilateral lenders, banks, and foreign bondholders-nonnally linked 

their own concessions to those of the other groups, and to the IMF program parameters. The Paris 

Club's insistence that sovereign debtors obtain "comparability of treatment" from other public and 

private creditors is perhaps the best-known example of such linkage. Third, the entire process was 

dominated by repeat players, a feature to which I return in more detail below. One might picture 

the regime in the late 1990s and early 2000s as a building assembled out of Lego blocks (Figure 

1). Each block represents a different creditor group that might contribute debt relief or new 

financing. Different building blocks could be assembled based on an IMF-supported program 

design. The precise mix would depend on the sovereign's debt composition, and its political and 

financial constraints. 

24. Compare stylized description of enforcement in Bulow & Rogoff, is to Forgive to Forget and A Constant Recontracting Model, supra note 2. 

25. For game-theoretic analysis of sovereign debt restructuring episodes, see, for example, VINOD K. 

AGGARWAL, DEBT GAMES: STRA TioG!C INTERACTION IN INTERNATIONAL DEBT RESCHEDULING ( 1996 ). 

7 
65 


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Figure 1: The Sovereign Debt Restructuring Regime circa 2000 

It is important to emphasize that the regime depicted in Figure I might have been informal, 

but it was far from chaotic. It delivered a measure of relief for debtors and impressive returns for 

creditors with no treaty, no statute, and no court in charge. 26 lt was flexible enough to adapt to 

massive shifts in global politics and economics. It was also effective enough, and accepted 

generally enough-just enough-to preempt far-reaching alternatives that periodically sprouted 

upY 

26. Carmen M. Reinhart & Christoph Trebesch, A Distant Mirror of Debt. Default, and Relief (Univ. of 

Munich, Def:'t of Econ., Discussion Paper No. 2014-49, 20'!4), https://e'pub.ub.unimuenchen.de/2 83211/Distant Mirror October 27 20J4.pdf; Carmen Reinhart & Christoph Trebesch, Sovereign 

Debt Relief and its Aftermath, T4 J. EUR. ECON. ASS TN 215 (2016) (debtrelieffigures); Michael Tom:z& Mark Wri~ht, 

Lmpmca[ Research on Sovere1gn Debt and Default, 2013 ANN. REV. ECON. 241; Chnstoph Khngen et aL, !tow Pnvate Creditors Fared in Emerging Debt Markets 1970-2000, at 37 (IMF, Working Paper No. WP/04/13, 2004) 

(observing "s1zable ex post premmms" for creditors of emerging market countries in the 1990s ), 

27. See. e.g., Sgard, supra note I; RIEFFEL, supra note 10, at 132-48 (describing the North-South Dialogue and 

the defeat ofthe International Debt Commission proposal in the 1970s); Hagan, supra note I (describing the rise and 

8 
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27420.033

Nonetheless, it is hard to explain the regime's durability by its outcomes alone. 

Restructurings came late, and often took a long time to complete.28 They delivered short-term 

liquidity relief, but often did not address the underlying solvency problems. 29 Re-defau!ts followed 

within a few years of sovereign debt restructurings in nearly forty percent of the cases. 30 While 

causation is open to debate, some mix of ill-conceived and ill-timed relief, and bad policy, likely 

played a part. 

The dominance of repeat players and institutions shaped by long-term political alliances 

may help make sense of the regime survival puzzle. Late twentieth century sovereign debt 

restructurings involved a relatively small and tight cohort of officials from a handful of countries 

and international organizations, a dozen or so big iinancial firms, and half a dozen law firms. 31 

They had developed restructuring practices through trial and error, reacting to crises. They were 

also invested in these practices and controlled the institutions charged with their operation. 

Knowing the composition of and relationships among the creditor groups, the customary sequence 

of negotiations, the range of terms Paris Club creditors had accepted as "comparable," the habitual 

exclusion of certain informally "preferred" claims from burden-sharing 32 was (and still is) 

invaluable in a world without public bankruptcy. Such knowledge can confer status, gain a seat at 

the negotiating table, and even help fashion arguments for reform. Long-tenn investment in the 

regime and a measure of social cohesion among those "in the know" helped sustain it. 33 

On the other hand, the structure of the regime-let alone the logic behind it-was 

unintelligible to ordinary people, the ultimate debtors and creditors. Public debt was a matter for 

private ordering, both in the legal sense (contract) and in the practical sense (behind closed doors). 

The regime as a whole could hardly claim to be effective, fair, or legitimate in absolute terms, if 

only because so few saw it as a regime or agreed on a standard by which to judge it. 34 It might 

have delivered serviceable outcomes, but for most stakeholders, it was not worth fighting for. 

fall of the IMF"s proposal for the Sovereign Debt Restructuring Mechanism (SDRM)). 

28. See,. e.g., supra note 8 (multiple sources citing evidence of the "too Iittlewtoo late" problem in sovereign debt restructurmg). 

29. See. e.g .. IMF, The Fund's Lendin~ framework and Sovereign Debt · Annexes, (June 20 14), [hereinafter TMF Lending Framework Annexes ].MF Lendmg Framework Annexes. ---

30. Duggar, supra note 8. 

31. GULATI & SCOTT. supra note 24, at 59-61; Gelpem &. Gulati, supra note 24, at 1634-36 (2006 ). 

32. Exclusion from comparability and other burden-sharing mechanisms was tantamount to a grant of senioritY. 

("preferred creditor status") for claims of identical legal rank. Short-term trade credits, interbank loans, and, unl!l :ccently, multi.lateraldebt,have enjoyed such informal preference:·· presumably based on other participants' collective judgment that It was 111 thc1r mterest to consent to mfonnal subordmatwn. See RUTSEL SILVESTRE J. MARTHA, Ranldng 

of Obligations, in THE FINANCIAL OBLIGATION IN INTERNATIONAL LAW 4 79 (20 15). 

33. Compare this depiction and Pierre-Hugues Verdier, 7he Polilical Economy qf International Financial 

Regulation, 88 Ind. L. Rev. 1405 (2013) (arguing that soft law and informal network governance in international 

financial regulation has empowered certain political actors to the detriment of financial stability). 

34. Legitimacy here does not look solely or primarily to the authority of the parties or the restructuring forum. 

but rather to the tem1s of the debt and the restructuring process that produce it. See Marie Sudreau & Juan Pablo 

Bohoslavsky, Sovereign Debt Governance, Legitimacy. and the Sustainable DeveloRment Goals: Examininrz the 

Principles on Responsible Sovereign Lending and Borrowing, 24 WASH. INT'i .. L.J. 6b (2015); cf the discussion of 

leg1llmacy above and Ill the text to ODETTE LIENAU, RETHINKING SOVEREIGN DEBT: POLITICS. REPUTATION, AND 

LEGmMACY IN MODERN FINANCE (20 14) (considering the function of sovereignty in sovereign debt). 

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27420.034

C A Changing Landscape, 2000-2010 

Several trends, some of which date back to the 1990s, have threatened to undermine the 

sovereign debt restructuring regime pictured in Figure I. I will focus on three of these trends. First, 

new creditors grew in importance. Countries such as China and Russia, as well as distressed bond 

funds and sovereign wealth funds, 35 among others. were not necessarily invested in the old 

restructuring processes and institutions. Second, cross-border capital mobility and government 

creditors' participation in the private capital markets eroded the boundaries of creditor groups, 

along with internal discipline and linkages among restructuring fora. Third, the vast scale of global 

capital flows made the JMF small by comparison, and put its central coordinating role in crisis 

management at risk. 

The rise of new official bilateral lenders has received relatively little attention in the 

academic and policy debates, particularly when compared to the attention showered on distressed 

bond funds. In the 2000s, manufacturing and commodity exporters with large stores of government 

savings, most notably China and the Gulf states, began investing more of their foreign currency 

reserves in the emerging markets. 36 This trend accelerated after 2009, when interest rates dropped 

near zero in Europe and the United States post-crisis, and sent investors looking for higher returns 

elsewhere. 37 In parallel, China expanded its official bilateral lending to poor and middle income 

governments so dramatically that it eclipsed the original Paris Club lenders in some countries 

within a few years. 38 

New creditors contributed to the rise in complex fonns of government-to-government 

lending that did not quite fit Paris Club reporting conventions. For example, Venezuela began 

borrowing from China against future oil sales in 2007; by 2015, oil payment advances from China 

35. "'Sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) arc special purpose investment funds or arrangements, ovmcd by the general government Created by the general government fOr macroeconomic purposes, SWFs hold, manage or administer assets to achieve financial objectives, ~nd ... finvest] in foreign financial assets." lntemational Working 

Group of Sovereign Wealth Funds (IWG-SWF), General(y Accepted Principles and Practices--· Santiago Principles. at 3 (Oct. 2008). 

36. See JMF, Market Developments and Issues. Global Financial Stability Report 99 (April 2006), [hereinafter IMF GFSR April 20061; see. e.g., Portji1lio Overview, AilU DHABI !NV. AUTHORJTY (ADIA), 

www.adia.ae/Enllnvestment!l'ortfolio.aspx (specifies 10-20% for government bonds and 15-25% for emer ing 

markets). ADJA's total assets under management were estimated at $773 billion. Andrew Torchia, Abu Dhabi zmd. ADL4 Manages Afore o(its Billions In-House, REUTERS (June 2. 2015). 

37. Serkan Arslanalp & Takahiro Tsuda, D:!!!Jfsj1.1g Global De!fl!JJ1t!J.Qr Emerging}vf.qrfset Sov~eiRn . .l.J£1>1.(lMF. 

Working Paper No. WP/14/39, 2014). 

38. For example, China became Angola's largest creditor by 2014, holding 41% of its debt, followed by the 

United Kingdom with 27%. IMF, An ala Sta Re 10rt or the 2014 Article IV Consultation, Countr Report No. 141274, at 9 (Aug. 14, 2014). Some o China's exposure is secure by oil. Yun Sun, China ·sAid to A rica: Hmsler or Messiah?, BROOKINGS (Feb. 2014). China's lending to Congo has grown rapidly since 2006, much of it effectively 

secured by oilJ'rocccds that Congo is required to keep on deposit in China. China became the dominant creditor after 

Congo secure HIPC and MDRJ relief from wealthy countnes and multilateral institutions. IMF, Republic o(Congo Sta Re ort l-or the 2014 Article fV Consultation, Country Report No. 14/272, at 9 (July 7, 2014); see also IMF, 

lie >u >lie o ·con o Sta lie or/ or The 2014 Article W Consultation -Debt Sustainahilitv Anal 'Sis Country Report No. 14/27 , at 2 (July 7, 2 14) (China accounted for 63% of Congo's oflcial bilateral debt and 15% of its overall 

external debt in 2010 ). 

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27420.035

reportedly were among the scant few sources of external financing it had left. In mid-20 16, 

Venezuela approached China for a debt restructuring by another name as more and more of its oil 

exports effectively functioned as debt repayments. 39 Angola was even worse off, with no spare 

export capacity left after making its debt payments in oil. 40 

Lending that combined features of trade, investment, development aid, and strategic 

alliance-building was not new, but the scale and the players were. 41 In the past, such complex, 

mixed-motive arrangements might have been settled quietly on the margins of Paris Club 

negotiations. Classifying the debt and finding a forum to renegotiate it is more of a challenge today, 

when both debtors and major creditors view the prevailing regime with suspicion, and are 

underrepresented in its institutions. 42 

Further complicating matters, government creditors could take advantage of bigger, 

deeper, more liquid international capital markets to sell their bilateral loans. 43 On the one hand, 

official creditors such as central banks and government reserve managers have long been important 

buyers of sovereign debt. Their market participation was viewed primarily through the lens of their 

monetary and exchange rate policy functions, and their extreme conservatism. However, it became 

increasingly apparent in the 2000s that central banks, reserve managers, and sovereign wealth 

funds were not uniformly risk-averse as bond investors; some made bets on the debts of troubled 

countries and actively managed their sovereign debt portfolios.44 

Active bond trading benefited sovereign borrowers: it promoted information and price 

discovery, expanded the range of potential buyers, and saved borrowing costs overtime. However, 

it also meant that the mix of public and private creditors behind a debt stock could change at any 

39. Corina Pons, Alexandra Ulmer & Marianna Parraga, Venezuela in Talkv with China for Grace Period in Oil-for-Loans Deal, REUTERS (Jun. 15, 2016). 

40. Libby George, Growing Chinese Debt Leaves Angola with Little Spare Oil REUTERS (Mar. 14, 2016). 

41. The phenomenon of deliberately ambiguous financing forms is not new. For example, the United States financed South Vietnam's military with disguised agricultural credits during the Vietnam War. See, e.g., Agreement 

between the Government of the United States of America and the Government of the Republic of Viet-Nam for Sales of Agricultural Commodities. 22 U.S.T. 1459. Sec. ILA.2 (June 28, 1971); Marian Nash (Leich), Contempormy Practice o(the United States Relating to International Law, 91 AM. J. !NT' I.. L. 697, 705-.{}6 (1997). Vietnam refused 

to repay the credits when it came to the Paris Club to restructure its debt in 1993. The difference is that the new creditors are not fully part of the institutions within which creditors ne~otiated how to deal with these ambiguities. For example, after the fall of Saddam Hussein, Iraq claimed that much of rts "debt" to its Gulf neighbors was supposed to have been a grant, to help support Iraq in its war against Iran. Negotiations with Gulf countries, which were not part of the Paris Club. lasted for years after the Paris Club had agreed on near-total relief. MARTJN A. WEJSS, CONG. RESEARCH SERV., RL33376,1RAQ'S DEBT RELJEF: PROCEDURE AND POTENTJAL IMPLICATJONS FOR INTERNAT10NAL DEBT RELJEF 6 (2009). 

42. See. e.J<., MARTJN A. WEJSS, CONG. RESEARCH SERV., RS21482. THE PARJS CLUB AND INTERNATJONAL DEBT RELJEF I (2013) (Chma and Gulf states are not part of the Pans Club); NGAIRE WOODS, GOVERNJNG TJJE 

GLOBAL ECONOMY: STRENGTHENING Mut.TtLATERAL INSTJTUTJONS 2 (2008) (observin(l_ that China and Gulf states arc underrepresented in the multilateral organizations, including the IMF and the World tsank). 

43. See, e.g .. Thomas Laryea, Donegal v. Zambia and the Persistent Debt Problems of Low-Income Countries, 73 L. AND CONTEMP. PROBS. 193-200 (2010) (analyzing a lawsuit brought in English courts by a private offshore fund 

on contracts that originated with Romania's bilateral agricultural credits to Zambra. Romania sold the loans to a private investor and avoided restructuring them in the Paris Club); see also,, Felipe Ossa, Woolly Outcome for Aries, ASSET 

SECURJTJZATION REPORT (July 3, 2006) (reportmg Gennany's securrtrzatron of rts export credrt loans to the Russ ran government). 

44 .. See, e.g._, IMF GFSR April 2006, supra note 36; Brad Setser, Norwa,v '!'as against Jcelar'd before it was fiw 

Iceland, fOLLOW 1HE MONEY BLOc, (May 17, 2008); Andres R. Martmez, ( /( Stops Buymg Lurope Government Debt on Crisis Concern, BLOOMBERG (May 10, 2012). 

11 
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27420.036

time, so that not even the debtor could ever know for sure who held what debt. 45 This would 

present a challenge when trying to organize a restructuring. 

While the mid-2000s were a period of rapid growth and relative calm in the sovereign debt 

markets, the IMF's ability to anchor a hypothetical crisis response46 suffered from the growing 

gap between its resources and the scale of global capital flows. Figure 2 shows IMF lending 

capacity against the background of capital flows in and out of the euro area and developing 

countries between 1999 and 2006. At the end of 1999, with much of Asia, Brazil, and Russia still 

in crisis, the IMF could lend up to $86 billion of its own resources, and borrow an additional $47 

billion from wealthy member govemments. 47 Even after disbursing nearly $10 billion to Brazil, 

$5.6 billion to Russia, and $6.3 billion to Indonesia during its 1998-1999 financial year, 48 the fMF 

could backstop a respectable 35 percent of gross outflows from the developing world. By 2006, 

with large emerging market economies issuing bonds and repaying the lMF, it could lend up to 

$189 billion of its own resources-but that was only eleven percent of the $1,723.8 billion in 

outflows from the developing world. 49 Including$!, 941.4 billion from the euro area in 2006 would 

put available IMF resources at five percent of the relevant capital outflows. Then again, no one 

had imagined in 2006 that the IMF would be disbursing $20.6 billion to Greece and $8.1 billion to 

Ireland in just four years. 50 

45. While their effect in sovereign debt markets is the subject of a heated debate, at least in theory, the rise of credit derivatives can further exacerbate the divergence between creditor incentives and their contractual claims. See Patrick Bolton & Martin Oehmke, Credit Defauli Swaps and The Empty Creditor Problem, 24 REV. FIN. STUD. 8 

(20 11 ); David Mengle, The Empty Creditor Hypothesis, ISDA RES. NOTES (2009); Skylar Brooks et al., IdentifYing 

and Resolving Inter-Creditor and Debtor-Creditor Equity Issues in Sovereign Debt Restructuring, CENTRE FOR INT'i~ 

GOVERNANCE INNOVATION (Jan. 12, 2015), https://www.cigionline.org/sites/defaultlfiles/pb no53.pdf; Nikki Tail & 

David Oakley, Brussels Gives Sovereign CDS Ji·ading All-Clear. FIN. TIMES (Dec. 6. 2010), http://www.ft.com/intl 

/cms/s/0/5be55b2a-016a-lle0-9b29-00 I 44feab49a.html#axzz42Ye94mRb (reporting the results of a European Union inquiry into credit default swaps as a potential source of speculative pressure on sovereign debt prices). 

46. PAUL BLUSTI;IN, OFF BALANCE: THE TRAVAILS OF INSTITUTIONS T!lA T GoVERN THE GLOBAL FINANCiAL SYSTEM I (2013) (describing the lMF during this period of relative calm. and its efforts to prepare for a potential 

crisis). 

47. IMF's Financial Resources and Li<fuidity Position, 1997-December 1999, 

http:/lwww.imf.org/externallnpltrelliquidll999/l299.htm (Net {,ncommitted Usable Resources). 

48. IMF, Re >ort o the Executive Board [or the Financial Year Ended April 30. 1999, Annual Report 1999, at I00-101 (Apr. 199 ). U .. dollar amounts arc based on SDRI,~USD1.37. 

49. 11\1F resources fared better compared to portfolio flows. In 2006, it could finance approximately 19 percent of combined euro area and developing country portfolio outflows. It could supplement this lending capacity m 2006 with $51 billion from borrowing arrangements with members. !MF's Financwl Resources and Liquidity Position 2004 ·~December 2006 (One-year Forward Commitment Capacity, memorandum items for General Arrangements to Borrow and New Arrangements to Borrow); IMF, Financial Market Turbulence: Causes Conse uences and Policies, Global financial Stability Report 2007, Stat. App. Table J, 136-37 (Oct. 2007) [hereinafter IMF GFSR October 2007 . Although portfolio flows are typically considered more volatile, the distinctiOn between portfolio and other types of capital flows may be overstatea. See, e.g., UN Development Programme, Towards Human Resilience: Sustaining MDG Progress in an Age of Economic Uncertainty 86 (2011). 

50. IMF, Nnancial Operations and Transactions, Annual Report 2011 App. Table JI.4 (2011), U.S. dollar amounts are based on SDRI=USDI.62. 

12 
70 


27420.037

Figure2: 

Total Capital Inflows and Outflows, IMF Lending Capacity 

Euro Area, Developing Countries and Emerging Markets 

(USD billions) 

Source: IMF 51 

Long-term decline of IMF lending capacity relative to cross-border bank lending, which can be 

prone to runs, paints a similar picture in Figure 3. 

Figure3: 

Where'sthe Powder? 

IMF Gross Capacity/Cross Border Bank lending 

www.dr.org/cgs 

Source: Council on Foreign Relations 94 

51. IMF GFSR October 2007. supra note 36; IMF"s Financial Resources and Liquidity Position, 1997-

December 1999, supra note 89; JMF's Fmancial Resources and Uquidity Position, 2004 ~December 2006, supra note 91. Figures for IMF lending capacity exclude available borrowmg arrangements, which stood at $47 billion in 

December 1999, and $51 billion in December 2006. Id. See also, One-Year Forward Commitment Capacity, supra note 87; MARKUS JAEGER, DEUTSCHE BANK RESEARCH, DOES TirE !MF HAVE SUFFICIENT RESOURCES TO BAIL O!Jr 

mE EMERGING MARKETS? (2008) (market view of!MF capacity in light of the "explosion" in net private capital flows 

and potential future exposure). 

13 
71 


27420.038

To the extent the IMF' s power to set restructuring parameters and nudge the process along 

depended on its unique ability to mobilize enough financing quickly to stop a run, stem contagion, 

and keep the distressed economy afloat during the workout, this power appeared to be at risk. 52 

The IMF's lopsided governance made matters worse. It reflected twentieth century 

compromises, with the G-7 and small European countries substantially overrepresented compared 

to the big emerging markets, whose voice and vote did not reflect the size and international 

importance of their economies. 53 Yet the incumbents showed few signs of either giving up control 

or investing in the IMF in the early and mid-2000s. As finance got bigger, powerful stakeholders 

spoke of the need to constrain the IMF as a source of"bailouts" and moral hazard. 5

4 Meanwhile, 

post-crisis countries, particularly in Asia, accumulated vast foreign exchange reserves and put in 

place regional arrangements that would allow them to bypass the IMF should misfortune strike 

again. 55 

Despite its outdated vote allocation, shrinking scale, self-insuring clients, and contested 

track record, the IMF remained indispensable in a debt crisis. It had the unique combination of 

institutional memory and analytical capacity, a record of past practice, a global membership, and 

a formal governance structure prescribed by treaty-which made its actions at least somewhat 

accessible and predictable. The IMF's role as distressed countries' gateway to external financing 

long made it a valuable lever for other actors; it rose in importance as other elements of the debt 

restructuring regime weakened. Public and private creditors sought to use lMF lending and arrears 

policies to gain leverage in restructuring negotiations. Sovereign borrowers cited IMF analysis and 

policy conditions to bolster their position vis-a-vis foreign and domestic constituents. 56 As it was 

called upon to fill more coordination gaps, the IMF was becoming both under-funded and 

overtaxed. 

Weaker discipline among creditors was not all bad for the debtors, even if it threatened to 

prolong the restructuring process. Without tightly-knit creditor groups linked by crossconditionality, sovereigns could play creditors off against one another. If private foreign investors 

52. James M. Boughton, The IMF as Just One Creditor: Who's in Charge When a Count~yCan 't Pay? CENlRE 

FOR INT'L GOVERNANCE INNOVATION I (Apr. 27, 2015); James M. Boughton et al., IMF Lending Practices and 

Sovereign Debt Restructuring, CENTRE FOR ]NT'L GOVERNANCE INNOVATION 4 (June 9, 2014). 

53. See, e.g .• EDWIN M. TR\fMAN, A STRA'JEGY FOR IMF REFORM (2006) (arguing for an overhaul in !MF 

governance and work program). 

54. See, e.g., JOHN B. TAYLOR, GLOBAL FINANCIAL WARRIORS: THE UNTOLD STORY OF INTERNATIONAL 

FINANCE IN TilE POST-9111 WORLD, at 98-110, 130-32 (2007), !lagan, supra note 1, at 345. 

55. See, e.g., Barrv Eichengreen, Commentary: A Blueprinljor JA!F Reform: More Than Just a Lender, 10 

INT'L FINANCE 153 (2007). The motives for reserve accumulatiOn are a matter of debate, with authoritative 

commentary split between attributing it to self-insurance against crises and exchange rate management. 56. See IMF.Access Policy in Capital Account Crises, Policy Papers 18-26 (July 29, 2002); IMF, The Fund's 

Lending Framework and Sovereign Debt--Preliminary Considerations. Policy Papers 8-21 (May 22, 2014 ). See also Lee C. Buchheit & Rosa M. Lastra, Lending into Arrears---A Poli<J' Adrift, 41 lNT'L LAW. 939 (2007); JAMES M. 

BOUGHTON, THE SILENT REVOLUTION: THE INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND 1979-1989 (2001); NGAIRE WOODS, 

THE GLOBALIZERS: THE 1MF, TilE WORLD BANK AND THEIR BORROWERS (2006) (descnbing emerging markets officials using the IMF as a lever in domestic reform negotiations). 

14 
72 


27420.039

would not lend or restructure, a government might turn to an oil-rich neighbor; if IMF conditions 

seemed too onerous, it could try borrowing from domestic banks, or from China; if Paris Club 

relief were slow in coming, foreign bondholders might be persuaded to move first. 57 

The upshot of these developments was a restructuring regime that was losing sway over 

both debtors and creditors. The London Club had disappeared as bank loans gave way to bond 

financing; the Paris Club at risk of becoming a side show. The IMF was at risk of becoming 'just 

one creditor" among many-and far from the biggest-anchoring a regime where other creditors 

could not be counted upon to cooperate. 58 In the background, national courts presided over isolated 

claims with no mandate to consider the overall debt picture, and had no way to compel the 

sovereign to follow their orders. Such a regime might be able to nudge willing parties to 

compromise, but was hardly fit to host mortal combat to come. 

II. Greece in Context 

In the article from which I draw in this testimony, I describe a series of crises between 2010 

and 2015 that publicly exposed major flaws in the existing sovereign debt restructuring regime. 

Below I focus on Greece because, in my view, it presented the biggest challenge to the IMF's role 

in the regime-but also illustrates its potential. Early in the crisis, the IMF repeatedly failed to 

shape debt restructuring outcomes, tainting public perceptions of its analysis and lending 

decisions. Greece also demonstrated the toxic politics of government-to-government debtreviving ugly stereotypes and stoking historical resentments--which threatened political 

compromises underpinning Europe's monetary union. 59 

The IMF, the European Commission, and the European Central Bank (ECB) launched a 

€110 billion ($145 billion) financing program for Greece on May 9, 2010. The IMF's contribution 

of€30 billion ($40 billion) to this "troika" package was by far the largest program in its history. 60 

The program went ahead despite IMF staff concerns about public debt sustainability, and based on 

heroic assumptions about tax collection, privatization, unemployment, economic growth, and a 

speedy return to the capital markets. 61 Figure 4, drawn from the IMF's own ex-post evaluation of 

that program, illustrates. 

57. Argentina, Ecuador, Nigeria and Venezuela all successfully deployed such strategies. 

58. Boughton. supra note 52. 

59. IMF, Greece: Ex Post Evaluation of Exceptional Access under the 2010 Stand-By Arrangement, Country 

Report No. 13 (June 2013) [hereinafter IMF Ex-Post Evaluation ofSBA (Greece)]. 

60. Press Release, IMF, IMF Executive Board Approves €30 Billion Stand-By Arrangement for Greece. No. 10/187 (May 9, 2010); IMF Ex-Post Evaluation ofSBA (Greece) supra note 59, at 9. 

61. !MF Ex-Post Evaluation of SBA (Greece) supra note 59, at 8; see also WD.LIAM R. CLlNE, MANAGING THE EURO AREADEBTCRISIS 185 (2014); David Keohane, Greek Government Acquires More Realistic Crvstal Ball, FT ALPIIA VILLE (Nov. I. 20 12) ( c1tmg IMF and market analys1s of IMF forecasts). 

15 
73 


27420.040

Figure 4: 

Evolution ofiMF Program Projections for Greek GDP and Unemployment 

under the 2010-2012 IMF Stand-By Arrangement for Greecc62 

("SBA" reflects projections in the May 2010 IMF stand-by arrangement) 

100 ,. 

ns 

... 

2006 2008 ~lV 2012 2014 

Early baseline projections had the debt ratio rising from 115 percent of Gross Domestic 

Product (GDP) in May 2010 above !50 percent in 2013, potentially reaching 220 percent in some 

stress scenarios. 63 The Fund's assumptions and program conditions were more sober than those of 

the European authorities before the lMF had been brought in. Moreover, IMF staff analysis, 

however rosy, was sufficiently pessimistic to warrant the conclusion that Greek debt could not be 

sustainable with "high probability" in the medium term. 

This judgment about debt sustainability posed a problem under the IMF's policy barring 

large-scale lending to over-indebted countries. As the staff saw it, the IMF had two choices: 

condition its participation in the troika on Greek debt relief, or ask its Executive Board to 

approve a policy change. Less than two years after the failure of Lehman Brothers had brought 

global finance to the brink, fear of Greece turning into "another Lehman-type event" took debt 

restructuring off the table.64 

The Lehman reference underscores the challenge of managing debt crises in large 

economies integrated in regional and global financial systems (the euro area is an extreme 

example). Neither the IMF nor the European Union was prepared to address contagion in 20 I 0 

with liquidity support for its likely victims. Although IMF members had agreed in 2009 to lend 

the Fund up to $576 billion,65 its resources remained visibly inadequate to rescue large euro area 

62. IMF Ex-Post Evaluation ofSBA (Greece), supra note 59, at 13, 17, 25. 

63. Paul Blustein, Laid Low: The IMF. the Euro Zone and the First Rescue of Greece, CENTRE FOR INT'L GOVERNANCE INNOVATION 2 (Apr. 7, 2015); IMF, Greece: Preliminarv Debt Sustainabi/ity Analysis-Updated Estimates and Further Consideratwns, Country Report No. 16/130 I (May 2016), [hereinafter IMF Preliminary Greek DSA May 2016) (citing public debt ratio of 115 percent of GDP, projected to top 150 percent despite policy 

adjustment); IMF Ex-Post Evaluation of SBA (Greece), supra note 59, at 16, 26-27 (citing inihal projections for debt to peak at f 54-156 percent of GDP in 2013, but continuing to rise above 220 percent under stress). 

64. Blustein, Laid Low, supra note 63 at 27. 

65. IMF ANNUAL REPORT FY20J I at 49 (tenfold expansion and activation of New Arrangements to Borrow (NAB) between November 2009 and April 201 0); DoMENICO LOMBARDI & SARAH PURITZ MILSOM, THE BROOKINGS 

16 
74 


27420.041

economies, certainly not two or three at the same time. The IMP's lending capacity in April 

2010, on the eve of its first Greek program, was $255.5 billion, counting supplemental borrowing 

of $253 billion.66 In the next twelve months, it would approve nearly $210 billion in new 

commitments, including large, front-loaded programs for Greece and Jreland.67 Spain and Italy, 

which looked shaky, were in a different category altogether. At the end of2009, Spain had $815 

billion in sovereign debt and Italy had $2.5 trillion, compared to Greece's $431 billion. In less 

than two years, foreign banks reduced their Italian government debt holdings by over $125 

billion.68 

3000000 

2500000 

2000000 

1500000 

lOOC'OOO 

500000 

FigureS: 

Selected Euro Area Government Debt and 

JMF Capacity 

m'll!!llllrcland 

~Portugal 

-IMF Lending Capacity, April2010 

Sources: Eurostat, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, !MF69 

INSTITUTION, THE EURO-AREA CRISIS: WEIGHING OPTIONS FOR UNCONVENTIONAL lMF INTERVENTIONS 4 (Dec. 2011). 

66. IMF's Financial Resources and Liquidity Position, 2008- April2010. 67. IMF ANNUAL REPORT · Appendix Table ll.l: Arrangements Approved during Financial Years Ended Apnl30, 2002-20 II, and urchases and Loans from the lMF, Financial Year Ended April 30, 20 II. SDR=U Activities -- Update April 28, 20 !!. 

68. · ernment debt was held by non-residents, mostly in the euro area. lNT'L 

MONETAR IMF Country Report No. 12/168 87-88 (Jul. 2012) (detailing Italian debt 

compositi · · bal Financial Stability Report 19 (Apr. 2012) (Figure 2.6, showing a lion between Q I 20 I 0 and 03 20 II). EUR=USb 1.3449 at the end of Q3 201!. Board of Governors o the Federal Reserve System (US), U.S. I Euro Foreign Exchange Rate [DEXUSEU], (retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, May 3!, 2016); see also lMF, Restorihg Con 1dence and Pro >ressin on Re orms, Global Financial Stability Report 30 (Oct. 2012) (Figure 2.9, showing t e ex1t o ore1gn pnvate investors m ta mn and Spanish government debt). 

69. Eurostat, Government Consolidate<) Gross Debt by Com~onents- Annual Data [tipsgol1], ("Government debt is defined as total gross debt at nominal value outstandmg at t e end of the year and consolidated between and 

within the sectors of general government."); Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (US), U.S. I Euro Foreign Exchange Rate [DEXUSEU], (retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, May 3!, 2016); JMF's Financial Resources and Liquidity Position. 2008 Apri/2010 (One-Year Forward Commitment Capacity). 

17 
75 


27420.042

If the crisis in Greece spread to Italy, contagion across the euro area, to the United Kingdom 

and the United States could bring back the darkest days of September 2008. 70 The euro area might 

have addressed the problem on its own-it had a powerful central bank, and strong economies at 

the core-but it was only beginning to develop the political consensus. legal and institutional tools 

against contagion. 71 When the risk of contagion topped the policy agenda, it was down to the IMF, 

which had crisis-fighting experience and resources on standby. In 20 I 0, these resources were not 

enough to support new and potential IMF clients, which were vastly bigger than the old ones. 

With no backstop in sight for large economies vulnerable to contagion from Greece, the 

IMF changed its lending policy. From May 20 I 0, countries whose debts were not sustainable with 

high probability could avoid restructuring and still get large-scale IMF support, provided there was 

a high risk of ·'systemic intemational spillovers."72 Greece then proceeded to borrow at least in 

part for the sake of broader financial stability-although Greece alone would be bound to repay73 

The IMF's failure to insist on debt relief for Greece in 20 I 0 was not in itself a challenge to 

the old sovereign debt restructuring regime; it was the IMF's inability well into 2011 to force a 

restructuring once it became convinced that one was necessary, and despite the risk to its own 

resources. 74 Finance officials had always been wary of debtor moral hazard, hurting banks, 

spending tax money, and, more recently, undermining the ''catalytic" effect oflMF lending on the 

debtor's access to the private capital markets. 75 The Lego house in Figure 1 did not require debt 

reduction per se, only some combination of new money, debt restructuring, and adjustment to fill 

the financing gap during the program period. Countries avoided restructuring in 21 out of 53 

emerging market sovereign debt distress episodes identified by the IMF between 1980 and 2012. 76 

Debt stock sustainability only hecame a formal condition for very large ("exceptional access") 

IMF programs in a policy introduced in 2002, as part of a campaign to limit bailouts and moral 

hazard. 77 

70. !MF, !ta~v: 2012 Article IV Consultation, Country Report No. 121167, at 12 (2012), https://www.imf.org/externalipubslli/scr/2012/crl2167.pdt: (Box 2: Italy"- Spillovers from a Potential Intensification of the Euro Area Crisis, showing cross-border borrowmg by Italian banks exceeding €1.4 trillion, primarily from Germany, France, and Austria. as well as elsewhere in the euro area, Eastern Europe and the United States). 

71. IMF, Euro Area Policies: 2015 Article JV Consultation-· Press Release, ,\'taff'I?.epori.JJ!Jd S'tqff_Jnent bv the 

E;recutive Director. Country Report No. 15/204, at 5 {July 2015) [hereinafter, Euro Area Article IV Report 2015] (highlighting continuing risk of contagion from Greece despite new ECB tools). 

72. !Jdf_fl.sf!!rms Policy for !'Jsgptional Access Lending, IMF Survey, (Jan. 29, 2016). 

73. Supra note 11-12 and accompanying text: compare lending to Greece to avoid a crisis elsewhere in Europe and lending to developing countries in the 1980s to avoid a banking crisis in New York and London, supra note 16 and accompanying text. The argument that Greece borrowed for lack of better tools to avoid contagion broadly is distinct from the argument that troika loans bailed out French and German banks. See. e.g., Dan Davies, 20 /()and All 

That-Relit%alintj the Greek Bai/ouf (Part/), BUU. MKT. (Jul. 21, 2015) (considering accusations that the Greek rescue bene 1ted ennan and French financial institutions). 

74. See Ashoka Mody, In Bad Faith, BRUEGEL (July 2, 20 15). http://bruegel.org/20 15/07/in-bad-faith/ (arguing that the IMF acted in bad fa1th by letting debt relief be deferred while insisting, along with euro area governments, on 

crippling adjustment conditions in Greece). 

75. IMF Lending Framework Annexes, supra note 29 at 9-20. 

76. !d. at 28. 

77. The new criterion was \'art of an effort to limit debtor and creditor moral hazard from IMF programs, instituted just as the global financia markets entered a period of relative calm. /d.; TAYLOR, supra note 54, at 119-21, 130-32 (2007). 

18 
76 


27420.043

There is no evidence that the 2002 policy made large programs any more exceptional, nor 

that it made debt restructuring more common-there were few crises to test it in the mid-2000s. 

However, for as long as the IMF remained a source of some and the gatekeeper for most external 

financing in crisis, the 2002 reform raised the stakes for IMF staff analysis of borrowers' debt 

sustainability. As the policy came to be interpreted, large-scale IMF programs would require deep 

debt restructuring unless that analysis showed sovereign debt to be sustainable "with high 

probability."78 Private creditors became big consumers of the analysis, and tough critics of the 

methodology. 

The IMF's capacity to leverage its analytical and financial resources to shape a country's 

recovery program had long anchored the sovereign debt restructuring regime. Greece exposed the 

limits of this role. JMF staff called for debt relief early in 201l; a bond restructuring came a year 

later, after more than $150 billion in private capital had fled the country and was replaced by public 

funds from the euro area and the I MF. 79 

After the bond restructuring in March 2012, discussed in more detail below, a new 

four-year Fund program brought more lending and projections that Greek debt would fall 

below 120 percent of GDP by 2020-even as domestic politics deteriorated and support for 

the program sank. 80 According to the IMF's own assessment in 2017, this program still 

suffered from implausibly rosy projections about political support for reform, market 

confidence and economic performance. However, IMF staff were markedly clearer in 

expressing their skepticism in the program documents 81 and, after a program overhaul in 

2013, program assumptions drifted closer to reality (Figure 6). 

78. IMF Lending Framework Annexes, supra note 29. 

79. IMF Ex-Post Evaluation of SBA (Greece). supra note 59, at 27; see also Matthew Higgins & Thomas 

Klitgaard. 1he Balance o(Payments Crisis in the F:uro Ar;cQ.f'eripherv, 20 CURRENT ISSUES ECON. & FIN IlNCE, no. 2. 

20!4,at7. 

80. IMF exposure would remain essentially unchanged. Press Release, IMF, IMF Executive Board_Ap..!2[QYCS f28 Billion Arrangement under Extended Fund Facility for Greece, No. 12/85 (Mar. 15;"2012-).----- - 81. !MF, Greece: Ex Post F:valuation of Exceptional Access under the 2012 Extended Arrangement No. 17/44 

(Feb. 2017) [hereinafter lMF Ex-Post Evalualion ofEFF (Greece )I. at I. 

19 
77 


27420.044

Figure 6: 

Evolution of IMF Program Projections 

under the 2012-2016 IMF Extended Fund Facility for Greece 

Real GOP Growth Nominal GOP 

25-0 

-·Sth Re\ilew 

-Actual 230 230 

210 210 

-4 

-6 190 190 

170 170 

2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 ?013 2014 2015 2008 2(.109 2010 2011 ?.012 20Ll 2014 2015 

Real Investment Growth 

10 

Reque<>t 

-1&2'1d Revw.v 

·...-~ .. 10 

-10 

·20 

2008 2009 2{)10 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 

foreign Salam.:~';' 

Source: IMF82 

30 30 ··Requ~st 

-1&2ndRC'JiC.V 

25 --S.th Re\~~· 25 

-Actual 

20 20 

15 15 

10 10 

2008 20(J9 2010 2011 2012 2\113 2014 .?015 

H!CP lnllatian 

-2 

2DOE 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 

Nonetheless, the program went ofl'track in 2014. In July 2015, the debt stock neared 180 

82. IMF Ex-Post Evaluation ofEFF (Greece), supra note 81 at 18. 

20 
78 


27420.045

percent of GDP and the Greek banking system was on life support from the ECB, rationing cash 

withdrawals. A new government was in a standoff with the troika over a third IMF program, and 

the IMF was at odds with its troika partners over government-to-government debt relief. In the 

middle of an acute political crisis, Greece threatened to abandon the euro and delayed repayment 

of€1.55 billion ($1.73 billion) to the IMF ... causing new anxiety for being "the first developed 

country to default" on the multilateral lender. 83 

The second IMF program never came back on track, and was abandoned in January 2016 

in the face of continued political turmoil. After a brief drop in 2012, Greek debt-to-GDP ratio was 

back at 180 percent in early 2016, and has malingered there since. In May 2016, Euro area 

governments agreed to disburse €10.3 billion ($1 1.5 billion) in new loans, but the IMF held back 

on a new program: it would wait for "a clear, detailed Greek debt restructuring plan."84 This was 

finally a principled position that might have produced better results had it come sooner. 

IMF staff had a hard enough time negotiating Greek program parameters with euro area 

institutions when private investors' money was on the line; with euro area taxpayers as the 

dominant creditors, the political challenge was nearly insurmountable. 85 At the outset, program 

parameters had to be settled with euro area institutions first, leaving little room for Greek agency 

(or policy "ownership'')86 For their part, euro area leaders had left themselves limited scope to 

maneuver: after telling their citizens that EU treaties categorically barred public debt forgiveness, 

they had to choose between the prospect of outright default and a mix of transactional engineering, 

accounting gimmicks and wishful thinking about Greek citizens' tolerance for more austerity. 87 

More bilateral financing was unpalatable, but default was still unthinkable for fear of financial and 

political contagion. The search for alternatives had produced six years of crippling economic 

decline and political upheaval. 88 

It was a foregone conclusion that the Paris Club would have no part in the Greek debt 

restructuring, even though it had been the preeminent forum for restructuring government-togovernment debt, while the Greek debt stock looked more and more like those of the poorest 

countries in the Paris Club, cut off from private markets. 89 Nonetheless, Europe insisted on 

83. See. e.g., Reuters, Greece Becomes the First Developed Countrv to Default on IMF {oan., NEWSWEEK (July 

1, 2015). 

84. Greece Bailout: IMF Queries Eurozone Debt Relie[Deal, BBC (May 25. 2016). 

85. !MF Ex-Post Evaluation ofSBA (Greece), supra note 59, at 21, 30-32. 

86. On Greek program "ownership." see IMF Ex-Post Evaluation of SBA (Greece), supra note 59. Compare 

BLUSTE!N, supw note 54, wllh WOODS, supra note 99 (on econom1c reform and power dynamics between emergmg market and multilateral officials) 

87. See. e.g., Ashoka Mody, Jfg.!.fJJ.gpg Schauble, Debt Relief and the Future o the Eurozone, BRUEGEL (August 6, 2015); Paul Carrel, Le a! Gra Areas GiFe Sco e or Greek Debt Relie I "Euro e Wants ft. REUTERS (July 9, 2015). 

88. See Mody, supra note 87. 

89. Both had triple-digit debt ratios and few private creditors. For example, at the end of2012, after most of its privately held debt had been repaid or restructured, Greece had a debt-to-GOP ratio north of 150 percent and rising, while private creditors held approximately 20 _r,ercent of its debt; the rest was in the hands of other governments and 

the lMF .. lMF Prelimi~ary Greek DSA May ~016, suwq not~ 63, at 4; compare debt composition figures cited in Jeromm Zettel meyer, Chnstoph Trebesch & M1tu Gulah, The (>reek Debt Restructurmg: An Autopsy. 28 ECON. POL 'Y 

21 
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27420.046

handling Greece as a family affair. To lighten its debt service burden, euro area governments 

quietly extended repayment term to between fifteen and forty years, and lowered interest rates to 

1 ,2 percent on average for the moment; however, they stood finn against reducing principal 

claims. 90 This approach might have relieved near-term liquidity pressures, but was not enough to 

alter the debt trajectory, nor to stop government-to-government debt from fueling political fights 

that cast doubt over the viability of the monetary union. 91 

In contrast to the tortured path to official debt relief, the 2012 Greek bond restructuring 

was a brilliantly executed operation--on a technical leveL Once it was launched, the deal was 

done, and done quickly. It covered a record-breaking stock of debt, approximately €200 billion 

($260 billion), and reduced the private debt burden by over fifty percent. 92 The smooth execution 

was mostly attributable to the fact that more than ninety percent of the bonds were governed by 

Greek law and could be amended retroactively by statute. 93 The Greek Bondholder Act enabled 

the government to call a single vote of all its Greek-Jaw bond holders, with quorum and voting 

thresholds set low at fifty percent and 66 2/3 percent, respectively, to ensure success. 94 The voting 

mechanism in Greek retroactive legislation was fundamentally unlike then-standard majority 

amendment provisions ("Collective Action Clauses;' or "CACs") in sovereign bonds: the Jaw was 

designed ex post to prevent individual bond series from dropping out and free-riding on the rest. 

CACs incorporated in contracts ex ante had always allowed some bonds to drop out. The single 

stock-wide vote legislated in Greece meant that either all or none of the bonds polled were bound 

to restructure. 

Greece got much less benefit from the CACs already incorporated in its foreign-law bond 

contracts, which had been held up as a bulwark against free-riders in G-7 statements and G-J 0 

reports since the mid-1990s. 95 As was customary at the time, CACs in Greek bond contracts 

governed by English and Swiss law applied only to individual bond series. Holdouts secured 

blocking positions in more than half of the series by number. The restructuring vote failed for 

approximately forty-four percent of foreign-law principal outstanding. 96 Private creditors holding 

513 (20 13) [hereinafter Greece Autopsy], and Liberia in 2007-2008, with 28 percent of the debt stock in the hands of 

commercial creditors, and an external debt-to-GDP ratio of 186 percent before debt relief. lMF. ldl!fl.·ia: Enha!lf'§.d lnitiatire or Heavil; Indebted Poor Countries CofJlJJletion Point /)ocument and Alultilateral Deht Re7TeTJiiTi[ativ£.,. 

Country Report No. 10 l92,at 32,41 (July 2010). 

90. IMF Preliminary Greek DSA May 2016, supra note 142, at 4-5 (arguing that substantial official debt relief to date is not enough to achieve sustainability); see also William R. Cline, Policv Brief 15-12: From Populist 

Destabilization to Reform and Possible Debt Reli~fin Greece, PETERSON INST. INT'L !':coN. (Aug. 2015). 

91. See, e.g., Jason Hovet, C::.ech Presiden.t Floats fde_a o(Greece Pavi~.1~, Dcbt~~.bv f-fost[m! ,Migrant Centers, REUTERS (Andrew Bolton ed., Mar. 6. 2016): Yams Varoufak1s, Cermanv Wont. pal~€ (Heek Pam ·It Has an Jnlere.!J jn Breaking Us, GUARO!AN (July 10, 2015). 

92. Greece Autopsy, supra note 89, at 2. 

93. Greece Autopsy, supra note 167. Retroactive legislation superimposed a majority voting mechanism on the entire stock of domest1c-law bonds. Although it was enacted after consultations with creditors, 1t was in no wav 

contractual- neither consensual nor market standard. The thresholds were designed to ensure that dissenting creditor:, would be outvoted by a combination of Greek and other euro area banks. 

94. Jd at ll-12 

95. ld at42. 

96. Greece Autopsy, supra note 89. 

22 
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27420.047

€6.4 billion ($8.3 billion) in bonds kept their old bonds and have been paid on schedule since. 97 

The 2012 restructuring also caused controversy for excluding €56.7 billion ($73.7 billion) 

in bonds held by euro area institutions, primarily the ECB and national central banks in the euro 

area. 98 The ECB was Greece's largest bondholder and the biggest holdout. The exclusion of central 

bank holdings sent the signal that some official creditors would get paid first even when their 

contracts were identical to those of private creditors, and threatened to make official support 

synonymous with subordination in the eyes of such creditors. 99 To diffuse market fears that could 

undermine its emergency interventions, the ECB later promised that its new financing would be 

on equal footing (pari passu) with the debt owed to private creditors. 100 This promise has not been 

tested. 

In sum, from the perspective of the evolving sovereign debt restructuring regime, the Greek 

experience between 2010 and 2016 implied that the IMF was weak, the Paris Club irrelevant, 

government creditors paralyzed by domestic politics, and issue-by-issue CACs mostly futile. It 

highlighted a peculiar structure of accountability in crisis management institutions, which allowed 

Greece to accumulate unpayable debt at least in part thanks to their own inability to stop contagion 

and manage domestic politics in creditor countries. Echoing the experience of developing countries 

in the 1980s, Greece took on more and more debt at least in part because the international financial 

architecture was unequipped to process its default. 

Today, Greece has total debt of€326 billion ($364 billion), of which it owes €226 billion 

($252 billion) to the ECB, the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) and its successor the 

European Stability Mechanism (ESM), and other governments in the euro area. 101 In other words, 

Greece's debt problem is overwhelmingly official, and therefore politically fraught. As noted 

earlier, much of the official debt has been restructured to lengthen maturities and reduce the interest 

rate, so that Greece's payments arc relatively modest. However, the enormous stock of debt and 

the likelihood that it would not come down on its own in the foreseeable future can depress investor 

confidence, and dim recovery prospects further. Perhaps more importantly, given recent history, 

the large debt stock can severely undermine political support for reform and continue to serve as 

a source of political discord in the euro area. 

97. Id. 

98. Id. at 15, 28. 

99. In addition to the Eurosystem holdin&s, €350 million in bonds held by the European Investment Bank (EJB) were excluded from restructurinu. !d. On the otner hand, Greek bonds held by the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund were treated alongside privately held bonds, and restructured over its objections. Richard Milne, Nonvay State Fund 

Sells Eurozone f)ebt, FIN. TIMES (May 4, 2012). · 

100. Press Release, European Central Bank, Technical Features of Outright Monetary Transactions (Sept. 6, 

2012) ("The Eurosystem intends to clarifY in the legal act concerning Outright Monetary Transactions that it accepts the same (pari passu) treatment as private or other creditors with respect to bonds issued by euro area countries and purcha>ed by the Eurosystem through Outright Monetary Transactions, in accordance with the terms of such bonds."). 

101. Jeromin Zettelmeyer, Eike Kreplin, & Ugo Panizza, Does Greece Need More Official Debt Relief! If So. 

flow Much?, Peterson Institute for International Economics Working Paper 17-6 (Apr. 2017) at 3. 

23 
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27420.048

On the bright side, the IMF's position in the troika arrangement has changed dramatically 

since the early days of the Greek program. After ending its last disbursing program in early 2016, 

the Fund has actively engaged in policy formulation and review, but has not resumed a financing 

program pending credible assurance of adequate debt relief by Greece's European partners. 

Meanwhile, the ESM has extended an €86 billion ($96 billion) program for Greece, covering the 

period from August 2015 to August 2018. As part of the program, euro area governments have 

insisted on IMF involvement to boost the credibility of policy design and performance review. In 

other words, for as long as it stands firm on its policy principles, the IMF may well have more 

policy clout now than it did in 2010, with less of a financial stake. This may be a temporary and 

idiosyncratic development, a function of recent history with IMF and euro area performance in the 

Greek crisis. Continued hopes for the IMF's return to a financing role, albeit a modest one, may 

have played a part. Nonetheless, it is a significant development. It shows that, while money is 

important, it is ultimately not the sole--or even the biggest-source of the IMF's leverage. 

III. Exceptional Access Reform and Contagion 

The IMF's involvement in Greece in 20 I 0-2012 faced withering criticism from all quarters. 

Fund staff responded with a concerted effort to recapture policy initiative in debt restructuring 

beginning in 2013. 102 Most importantly, in January 2016, the Executive Board did away with the 

systemic risk exception that had allowed the IMF to lend to Greece and others despite its 

questionable debt profile. 103 Tt also expressly broadened the range of restructuring outcomes IMF 

staff could seek when a country's debt sustainability was in doubt, introducing a measure of 

flexibility in the 2002 lending policy as it had been interpreted.to4 

Under the new policy, a country whose debt sustainability is in the gray zone might be 

asked to secure its creditors' commitment to maintain their exposure as a condition oflMF support. 

Although the debt would not be paid on schedule, creditors would not necessarily suffer losses 

until and unless the analysis indicated that the debt was, in fact, unsustainable. However, public 

money would not finance massive payments to private creditors, as happened in Greece in 2010-

2012. Similar conditions had been imposed on several occasions before 2002. 

Had the revised policy been in place in 2010, it probably would not have changed the 

outcome in Greece. European authorities at the time resisted the notion of any change in the 

payment terms of EU member state debt, and, in the aftermath of Lehman, other governments 

agreed. The no-restructuring bridge was crossed with the 2012 Greek bond exchange. On balance, 

the new exceptional access policy should reduce pressure on IMF staff to produce optimistic debt 

l02. See Sovereign Debt Restructuring---Recent Deve/oRments and Implications for the Fund's Legal and 

Policy Framework, IMF (April26, 2013) [hereinafter IMF 20b Sovereign Debt Review]. 

103. Press Release, IMF, IMF Executive Bo~[d Approves Ex<;!'ptional Access Lending Framework Refom1s, No. 16/31 (Jan. 29, 2016). 

104. !d. 

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projections in order to lend. 

Nonetheless, he subject of contagion, which loomed large over the IMF's early lending to 

Greece and the erstwhile systemic risk exception, remains an important gap in the international 

policy framework. The IMF's revised access policy effectively tries to remove the Fund from the 

contagion calculus when the crisis country's debt is unsustainable. The policy approved in January 

2016 suggests that, to stem contagion, other governments should finance a country like Greece 

bilaterally on below-market tenns. 105 

Disclaiming responsibility for fighting contagion should help reduce political pressure on 

the IMF to lend to over-indebted countries-a good thing. 106 However, if this disclaimer is to have 

broad credibility, it is imperative for other parts of the global financial system to take on the task 

of addressing the risk of contagion. 107 In Europe, a response to contagion without the IMF is more 

plausible today than it might have been in 2010 or even 2012, since the euro area has developed 

an expanded toolbox to provide central bank liquidity and multilateral crisis financing, at least to 

the smaller economies. 108 However, if these tools, in Europe or elsewhere, prove to be inadequate 

relative to the scale of likely capital outflows, pressure on the IMF would return in the next crisis. 

As a membership organization with a crisis-fighting mandate, the IMF could find such pressure 

hard to resist, with further damage to its analysis and reputation. 

IV. Lessons and Policy Recommendations 

Sovereign debt restructuring has always been a flawed enterprise. It would be wrong to 

describe the 1980s and the 1990s as the halcyon days of debt relief and burden-sharing. 

Agreements took years to negotiate and failed to secure a durable exit from debt crises. There were 

endless iterations of piecemeal relief and painful adjustment. But by the end of the twentieth 

century, debt crises unfolded in a regime that had its own structure and customs, and exerted a 

measure of discipline over its constituents within an IMF-centered analytical framework, thanks 

to cohesion among similarly-situated creditors and linkages among public, private, domestic and 

external restructuring processes. The regime was surprisingly resilient: creditors could come and 

go, but the overall framework would change incrementally, in response to discrete problems. It 

was recognizable from crisis to crisis, and was familiar to a small core of specialists and repeat 

players. Nonetheless, it was unintelligible as a whole, and felt unaccountable to the lending and 

105. Press Release, IMF, IMF Executive Board Approves Exceptional Access Lending Framework Reforms, 

No. 16/31 (Jan. 29, 2016) (reporting Board approval of the policy); IMF, The Fund's Lendin~; Framework and 

Sovereign Debt~Further Considerations, Policy Paper (Apr. 9, 2015) (policy reform proposal). Going forward, this 

would mean a lot more bilateral rescue packages of the sort the United States had arranged for Mexico as a temporary 

measure to stem the 1990s Tequila cris1s. 

I 06. IMF, The Fund's Lending Fl'amework and Sovereign Debt~ Further Considerations, Policy Paper 1 0-ll (Apr. 9, 2015). 

I 07. IMF, The Fund's Lending Framework and Sovereign Debt- Further Considerations, Policy Paper (Apr. 

9. 20!5) 

108. Euro Area Article IV Report 2015, supra note 71 

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borrowing public. 

The Greek crisis was one of a series of shocks that threw the regime into disarray. It was 

particularly damaging to the lMF. Having lost its preeminence as a lender, the Fund appeared to 

compromise its analysis under political pressure from a powerful subset of its shareholders. 

Meanwhile, debt fueled street protests and political crises. It was high time for refonn. 

Initiatives to reform the sovereign debt restructuring regime poured in from different 

corners of the sovereign debt universe. As noted earlier, the IMF launched a comprehensive review 

of sovereign debt restructuring in 2013, including proposals to reform its analysis and lending 

policies. 109 The U.N. General Assembly called for a multilateral sovereign debt restructuring 

framework in September 2014, and endorsed a set of "Basic Principles" for sovereign debt 

restructuring a year later. 110 The resolutions built on a multi-year work program at the U.N. 

Conference on Trade and Development (UNCT AD), which also produced a restructuring 

"roadmap" for sovereign debtors. 111 The International Capital Market Association (ICMA) 

proposed new contract reforms in August 2014, including stock-wide aggregated majority voting 

adapted from the 2012 Greek Bondholder Law. "Super-aggregated" CACs were a product of 

ICMA's collaboration with other industry bodies, large emerging market debtors, the IMF and 

official bilateral creditors. They have been adopted in the majority of new international sovereign 

bond issues-although outstanding stock without these terms remains high. 112 

Perhaps more than any other actor in the sovereign debt restructuring regime, the JMF has 

learned from the crisis, and has pursued meaningful reforms. I have already mentioned its 

initiatives with respect to debt sustainability analysis and large-scale lending, as well as its 

facilitation of bond contract reform. However, more remains to be done to achieve sustainable 

outcomes. a comprehensive and collective restructuring process, and an intelligible and 

accountable restructuring regime. 

A. Sustainable Outcomes 

The existing regime tends to approach debt sustainability as a fact, an ascertainable 

threshold: an economy's debt stock or debt service burden is either stable and payable, or doomed 

to keep growing. As noted earlier, this threshold can be hard to calculate with precision; however, 

109. IMF 2013 Sovereign Debt Review, supra note 102. 

II 0. Sixty-ninth General Assembly, l02nd Meeting (PM), Discussion of Draft Resolution on "Basic Prine~ 

on Sovereign Debt Restructuring Processes" (document A/69/L.84 ), September I 0, 2015. 

Ill. Report of UN Conf. on Trade and Dev., Sovereign Debt Workouts: Going Forward, Roadmap and Guide (Apr. 2015). 

112. Progress Report on Inclusion of Enhanced Contractual Provisions in International Sovereign Bond 

Contracts, IMF, December 2016. The U.S. Treasury convened a working group for two years, culminating in ICMA's model clause proposal. Collective Action Clauses, INT'L CAP. MKT. Ass'N (August 2014); see a/so Anna Gelpern, Ben Heller & Br~d Setser, Count the Lifr!bs: Designing Robust Aggregation Clauses in Sovereig'! Debt Contract~ 

(forthcommg m 100 LITTLE, TOO LATE: fHE QUEST TO RESOLVE SOVEREIGN DEBT CRISES (Martm Guzman, Jose Antonio Ocampo & Joseph E. Stiglitz eds., 20 16). 

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the basic idea is relatively straightforward. 

It is generally understood, but less commonly discussed, that sustainability is also a 

political judgment about distribution of resources between debtors and creditors, and among 

different creditors with claims on the sovereign. A sovereign debtor allocates political capital, 

refonn efforts and budget resources across a range of priorities that might include veterans' 

pensions, foreign bond payments, domestic bank bailouts, girls' education, and gold statues of 

military leaders. A government creditor chooses to lend its crisis-stricken neighbor billions of 

dollars to pay off its bonds, to wage war on a common enemy, to pursue economic refonn, or some 

combination. In all cases, achieving sustainability requires political support from the government's 

domestic constituents and foreign creditors, since it implies loss distribution on a substantial scale. 

Because they implicate sensitive political calculations, debt sustainability judgments 

expose IMF staff to political pressure, overt or implied. As the Greek case amply demonstrates, 

sustainability politics can threaten the IMF's credibility, and cast doubt on its impartiality. 

Crucially, sustainability judgments are at greater political risk when they are tied rigidly to lending 

policies. In a battle between emergency financing and analysis, analysis is likely to lose. 

To reduce the political burden on the IMF while taking advantage of its staff expertise, it 

is important to build still-broader consensus around debt sustainability methodology, including the 

range of assumptions that might go into a model, and to harness independent analytical capacity 

outside the Fund, which could be mobilized in crisis and be accepted by the relevant constituents. 

For example, sustainability determinations could be made by standing or ad hoc expert 

panels, drawn from agreed lists including market, civil society, and public sector representatives. 

Such panels may consider data and other input from IMF staff, peer governments, market and 

academic experts. A representative working group under the auspices of the IMF or another 

multilateral body can develop and periodically review the substantive methodology, and agree on 

rules for constituting panels. Panel determinations of sustainability need not be binding. However, 

debtors and creditors may wish to incorporate them by reference in their contracts and policies, to 

reduce uncertainty in the event of a crisis. In a more modest version of tbis proposal, the IMF 

would continue to follow its in-house debt sustainability analysis (DSA), but would account 

publicly for any material divergence between its own analysis and that of an independent panel. 

IMF DSAs can and should continue to play an internal role at the Fund, for example, to 

assess the risk of a program to the IMF's own resources. This determination is distinct from 

whether a country should borrow or restructure, and on what terms-and would benefit from being 

made separately. Put differently, it is plausible for the IMF, the sovereign borrower, and its 

creditors to reach different conclusions about what is achievable and desirable, taking both politics 

and economics into account. Each may come to the table with different assessments and different 

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normative priors. IMF staff may well decide that the sovereign's analysis does not add up. In that 

case, the IMF should not lend. If no other funding is available, the government may default or 

restructure; it may also continue to engage with the IMF to arrive at a consensus analysis. However, 

it is also possible that other financing sources would materialize, especially if the IMF is capacity 

constrained. 113 A key lesson of Greece is that abstaining from a program that might strain its 

analytical credibility can bolster the IMF's position in a more diverse field of creditors, and 

preserve its resources-perhaps even to fight contagion. 

B. A Comprehensive, Collective Restructuring Process 

Among the most sobering lessons from Greece concerns the role of government creditors 

in sovereign debt restructuring. In late twentieth-century restructurings, debtors came from lowand middle-income countries, while creditors came primarily from G-7 and OECD countries and 

had a stake in the Paris Club forum. With very rare exceptions, government-to-government debt 

tended to stay in the hands of the original creditor. 

It would be imprudent to assume that the next sovereign debt crisis would continue to follow 

this pattern. Some of the biggest official bilateral creditors, including China, Russia, and the Gulf 

states, have no stake or a limited stake in the Paris Club process (although Russia is a member). 

After the Greek experience, it is safe to say that any debt problems of euro area countries would 

be entirely outside the club's purview. 

On the other hand, more and more governments hold one another's bonds. As noted earlier, 

the ECB was the biggest holdout in the 2012 Greek restructuring. It has since stated that it 

considers itself bound to vote against a debt restructuring if CACs were invoked. 114 In a very 

different setting, Russia's sovereign wealth fund, which holds a $3 billion bond claim against 

Ukraine, remains the biggest holdout in that country's 2015 bond restructuring. In 20 !6, the bond 

trustee sued Ukraine on Russia's behalf in an Eng! ish court. The court reaffirmed in March of this 

year that the bonds would be treated as ordinary commercial contracts, notwithstanding the 

extraordinary circumstances of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. 

The rise of new creditors and forms of financing that mix trade, investment, and finance, 

elevates the importance of consistent accounting and reporting. If the trend continues, it will get 

harder and harder to categorize a debt contract as official, private, domestic, or external. Private 

financial industry groups, official creditors, including the IMF and members of the Paris Club, but 

113. Boughton, supra note 52. 

114. O~inion of Advocate General Cruz Villalon delivered on 14 January 2015, in PeterGauweiler and Others v Deutscher undestag, Request for a l'rehminary ruhng from the Bundesverfussungsgericht, at §235 ("Moreover, the ECB has stated in its written observations that, in the context of a restructuring subject to CACs, it will always vote against a full or partial waiver of its claims. In other words, the ECB will not actively contribute to bringing about a restructuring but will seek to recover in full the claim securitised on the bond. The fact that the ECB acts with a view to preserving its claim in full confirms that the aim of its conduct is not to grant a financial advantage to the debtor State but to ensure that the latter meets the obligation it has entered into.") 

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also the International Forum of Sovereign Wealth Funds, liS would benefit from comparing notes 

on their respective accounting conventions and reporting requirements. Unless such groups 

cooperate in this apparently mundane task, creditors would be tempted to engage in a form of 

regulatory arbitrage, characterizing the same debt in multiple ways in order to free-ride on others' 

concessions. 

The IMF recently refonned its policy on lending to countries that have stopped paying their 

govemment creditors, to bring it in closer alignment with its policy on sovereign arrears to private 

creditors. 116 This was a sensible change, arguably long overdue. However, more analytical and 

policy work remains to be done to ensure that all official and all private creditors contribute to 

resolving a sovereign debt crisis in a fair and meaningful way. In particular, it is important to 

account for governments and private creditors holding identical tradable bonds while their interests 

and sources of leverage over the sovereign debtor are very different. The experience in Greece and 

Ukraine suggest that creditors with fundamentally different incentives should not participate side 

by side in the same bond restructuring vote; however, there should be a credible way to account 

for their contribution to the country's recovery program. One way of addressing this problem in a 

bond restmcturing would be to disenfranchise all bonds held by official creditors in a debt 

restructuring vote--or, at a minimum, to segregate them in a separate voting pool bound to make 

comparable concessions. 117 

Finally, much has been said already on the need to elaborate the IMF's approach to working 

with countries that are members of a monetary union. The fact that a sovereign debtor in a 

monetary union has limited agency, and that other stakeholders and decision makers may be 

beyond the purview of conventionallMF tools, is among the more painful and awkward lessons 

of Greece. The fact that a monetary union can, in effect, take some policy areas and sources of 

funding off the table is counter to the imperative of making the debt restructuring process collective 

and comprehensive. It also detracts from transparency and legitimacy. 

C. An Intelligible and Accountable Regime 

Sovereign debt restructuring experience must be accessible and intelligible to the public. 

Of all the items on my policy wish list, this is the easiest to implement, and likely to have a 

significant long-term impact. 1 18 It is also unglamorous. 

It is simply wrong in this day and age that sovereign debt restmcturing experience, 

115. The International Forum of Sovereign W 5'alth Funds is a self-governing for sovereign wealth funds. 

116. !MF, Refimning the Fimd"s Po/icv on Non-toleration o(Arrears to Official Creditors (Dec. 2015) 

117. As an alternative to separate classification or disenfranchisement, official creditors could also commit not to trade their debt, and not to enforce it in national courts. However, such a commitment may be politicallv hard for official creditors to make, and hard to enforce. -

118. This proposal is already part of the UNCT AD Roadmap, supra note 111 

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including the most basic facts about legal and financial outcomes, is not easily accessible in the 

public domain. Instead, we rely on painstaking detective work of academic researchers and 

commercial databases. Any international organization, trade or civil society group can host a 

comprehensive, searchable public database of past restructurings, including financial and legal 

terms, the treatment of public, private, domestic. and foreign claims, and any underlying 

assumptions-made available as soon as practicable after the agreement is finalized. The sovereign 

borrower should be responsible for supplying required information in standardized form within a 

prescribed period. At least basic summary terms should be available in English and in the language 

of the borrowing country. The requirement to disclose restructuring terms can be incorporated in 

standard form debt contracts, as well as in IMF and other institutional lending policies. Failure to 

deliver information within a reasonable period without a compelling justification could give rise 

to sanctions, including claw backs of restructuring concessions in extreme cases, such as fraud. 

Of course, the IMF is ideally placed both to require and host such disclosure. However, if 

it does not, someone else should. 

Conclusions 

Sovereign debt crises are, by definition, systemic financial and political crises in the 

borrowing country. They could never be orderly or predictable in the strict sense. Sovereign debt 

restructurings in the late 20'h and early 21'' centuries have had a remarkable track record of 

operational success and substantive failure. Deals got done, but few debtors got timely and durable 

relief. The informal regime with the IMF at the core, which has dominated sovereign debt 

restructuring since the 1980s, has been under stress in recent years as a result of changes in 

international politics and international capital flows. The Greek crisis is a stark example of the 

continuing challenges to the regime. 

Although the IMF."s experience in Greece inarguably damaged its credibility, on balance, 

the Fund has been a force for good in Europe, and has demonstrably learned from its mistakes. It 

has undertaken welcome reforms in its lending policies and debt sustainability analysis, and, most 

recently, has shown that its analytical depth and crisis management experience remain 

indispensable even after it has stopped lending to Greece. The lesson is not that the IMF never 

needs the money, but that it always needs credibility-and that it has managed to recapture it in 

this case, despite the early setbacks. The IMF is the only international institution today capable of 

bringing together diverse stakeholders in a comprehensive debt restructuring framework, adapting 

quickly in a volatile and fast-changing world. It is in everyone's interest to bolster the IMF's hardwon credibility and independence and encourage continued reform. 

* * * 

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Testimony before the 

Subcommittee on Monetary Policy and Trade 

Committee on Financial Services 

U.S. House of Representatives 

May 18,2017 

Meg Lundsager 

Public Policy Fellow 

Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars 

Chairman Barr, Ranking Member Moore, and Members of the Subcommittee, thank you for 

inviting me to testify on the "Lessons from the IMP's Bailout of Greece." Many complex issues 

surrounded IMF lending to Greece during my tenure as U.S. Executive Director on the lMF 

Executive Board from 2007-2014. I continue to focus on these issues as a Public Policy Fellow 

at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. My testimony today reflects my 

personal views, not those of the Wilson Center. 

Summary: 

International Monetary Fund (IMF) lending to countries that are members of the Eurozone has 

strained key IMF principles and undermined its lead role in designing adjustment programs and 

financing packages for countries suffering balance of payments crises. IMF lending programs 

that normally encompass all aspects of macroeconomic and financial sector policy have been 

shaped more by European needs than by IMF standards. 

Conditionality for Eurozone members differs sharply from that for most other IMF members and 

weakens the IMF's commitment to treat its members uniformly in terms ofthe types of policy 

adjustments demanded in lending programs. The IMP's principle of uniformity of treatment has 

been a foundation of the IMF's ability to treat each member fairly while designing programs to 

achieve economic and financial stability. Programs are shaped to country circumstances and 

therefore are not necessarily identical across the membership. In the Eurozone crisis however, 

key policies were set by European institutions, leaving the IMF little room to design a program 

that could create conditions for Greece's recovery. 

IMF financing requirements have come second to European practices and procedures, despite the 

decades long priority treatment all!MF members have accorded to their loans from the IMF. 

Eurozone governments have created their own €500 billion financial rescue fund, the European 

Stability Mechanism (ESM), and therefore do not need IMF funding. With little likelihood that 

Europe will adjust its internal rules and regulations to accommodate the JMF, the preferred 
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future approach is that Eurozone countries do not seek IMF lending. IfEurozone members do 

exercise their right to request IMF financing, the IMF should have in place a defined policy 

establishing its primacy in program design. 

The following statement outlines IMF practices and how programs for Eurozone countries, 

particularly Greece, deviated from those practices, leading to the conclusion that the Eurozone 

members should address their financing needs with their own internal resources. Finally, 

recognizing that the IMF Articles of Agreement enshrine each member's right to seek IMF 

financing, this statement includes recommended policy reforms the IMF should adopt before 

lending to a Eurozone member. 

IMF Role and Challenge of Eurozone Count1y Programs 

The International Monetary Fund serves as a foundation of the international economic order and 

over the seven decades of its existence, has supported numerous international economic policy 

objectives of the United States. The IMF bas moved quickly to help crisis countries restore 

financial and economic stability. This bas helped put a floor under a country's economic 

contraction, preventing economic recessions from becoming economic depressions, thereby 

reducing the loss of jobs and incomes. This also reduces the likelihood of financial crises 

spilling across borders. 

IMF programs condition lending on economic reforms such as tightening monetary policy by 

raising interest rates, reducing government deficits, taking action to resolve tottering domestic 

banks, and in some cases, depreciation or devaluation of a country's currency. The program 

negotiation enables the country and IMF staff to discuss policy alternatives to achieve the desired 

objectives. Monetary policy expectations are always included in an IMF program and each 

program aims to achieve debt sustainability. 

The IMF considers exchange rate policy to be a key part of its discussions in all programs. If the 

country is a member of a currency union and cannot on its own change its exchange rate, the 

IMF will devise policies that likely have the impact of lowering domestic prices and wages, or 

reducing that country's inflation relative to trading partners. Relatively lower domestic prices 

then substitute for an exchange rate adjustment. This is what is meant by 'internal devaluation,' 

which in the end occurred to some extent in all Eurozonc program countries as sharp economic 

contractions put downward pressures on domestic wages and prices. 

This traditional approach is often viewed as the IMF imposing austerity on the member. But of 

course a country only approaches the IMF for assistance once its economic crisis has destroyed 

investor confidence and currency outflows have depleted foreign currency reserves. Once 

foreign exchange reserves are dangerously low, the country has little choice but to devalue its 

currency and/or drastically tighten its monetary and fiscal policies. IMF policy 

advice/conditionality and financial support can mitigate the economic contraction needed to 

restore stability. 

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The IMF also will work closely with key bilateral and multilateral partners, as aid and credit 

programs provide valuable technical assistance and critical funding. Debt relief from official and 

private creditors may also be included in the financing package. 

Partnering with other institutions providing assistance requires reconciling divergent institutions' 

mandates. In recent years, managing such relationships has become much more complex and has 

put the JMF in the middle of trying to navigate the cross currents among the various partners, 

while negotiating difficult economic policy choices with the member country. This is what 

occurred in the case of Greece. 

The IMF's lending programs with countries that are members of the Eurozone have brought to 

light new complexities which the IMF has yet to resolve. IMF involvement in early Eurozone 

country programs was critical to preventing a broader European wide crisis that ultimately could 

threaten the existence of the Eurozone. But that engagement also revealed the lack of clarity 

regarding the IMF role vis-a-vis the European entities providing financial support. European 

priorities limited the ability of the IMF to follow its traditional approach and adhere to its own 

policy of uniformity of treatment. 

The Eurozone Crisis Impact on the IMF 

All countries borrowing from the IMF must show a balance of payments need. Each Eurozone 

country faced balance of payments difficulties as their trade balances and capital flows 

worsened. Each Eurozone member also faced large fiscal challenges as economic recessions 

reduced government revenues. Domestic banking systems needed shoring up and unemployed 

workers received benefits, requiring additional fiscal resources. 

In the end, the govemments of Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Cyprus ran out of ready access to 

Euros, their own domestic currency as depositors shifted funds to other Eurozone countries and 

governments could only roll over very short term debt at high interest rates. 

These four countries are members of the European Central Bank (ECB). which creates Euros and 

manages monetary policy for the Eurozone. As Greece first slid into crisis, European partners, 

particularly Germany, planned to resolve the problem within the Eurozone. Once the depth of 

economic mismanagement in Greece and the size of the financing gap became clear, European 

partners asked Greece to approach the IMF for financing as well. 

Negotiating Greece's adjustment program was complex as the European Commission (EC), the 

European Central Bank (ECB), bilateral partners, and the IMF all were demanding Greek 

reforms in exchange for financing. This negotiating pattern evolved into the 'troika' consisting 

of the European Commission (EC), the ECB and the IMF. 

The IMF loan for Greece was put together quickly in 2010 in order to prevent Greece defaulting 

on its debt obligations. In the months leading up to the Greece program approval in May fears 

grew that Greece's crisis would spread to other Eurozone members, including Spain and even 

Italy. Europeans needed the IMF's quick action to keep Greece solvent while they arranged 

European financing. The IMF could act quickly, while European partner financing required 

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decisions by national governments and Parliamentary votes. Furthennore, the Eurozone did not 

at that time have an institution tasked with imposing the kind of macroeconomic conditionality 

Greece needed and the IMF could provide. 

Since that time, Europe has established the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), which has the 

ability to lend €500 billion and is now the primary source of new Euro funding to Eurozone 

members. European leaders themselves are now expecting to finance future crisis programs 

from this mechanism, and claim they arc less likely to turn to the International Monetary Fund 

for financial participation in a lending program. This is a welcome development. 

Where does this leave Greece? 

In the meantime Greece has yet to restore economic groi'V1h or generate new jobs, as investment 

has stalled amid the uncertainty over external financial support, including how European partners 

will honor their commitment to restore Greece's debt sustainability. Greece's outstanding debt is 

very high, at 180 percent of its GDP, and likely to remain high for a number of years. 

Greece's European partners have insisted Greece pursue a new program with the IMF to coincide 

with the final year of Greece's ESM program. Germany seeks a parallel IMF agreement in order 

to secure domestic German support for the ESM loan disbursement. 

The IMF asserts that it will not join a new lending program without European creditors clarifying 

how they will reduce Greece's indebtedness over the longer term. European officials have ruled 

out any outright reduction of principal, or 'haircuts', but have signaled that sustained low interest 

rates and very long maturities could be considered, if necessary, assuming Greece completes its 

current ESM program successfully next year. The IMF has signaled that it would accept further 

maturity extensions and longer term commitments of very low interest rates, instead of outright 

haircuts on outstanding debt. 

European officials have repeated previous commitments but as of last week, have not yet 

specified the extent of debt relief that will be provided to Greece after 2018, assuming Greece 

meets its ESM program targets. An IMF official stated that the European partners ''need to have 

numbers on what are the potential (debt) measures, to show these potential measures really entail 

a game changer as far as debt is concerned." The IMF Managing Director, Christine Lagarde, 

stated "European partners need to be more specific in terms of debt rclief."(Reuters May 12, 

2017) 

The IMF has rightly focused on reducing the level of outstanding debt, to signal to Greek and 

potential foreign investors that future debt servicing requirements will not impede profitability 

and investment, which are needed for job creation. 

The IMF is also concerned that the Europeans are expecting Greece to run a very tight fiscal 

policy for a prolonged period of time, something very few countries have succeeded in doing. 

The IMF would prefer that additional fiscal resources provided by further debt relief be applied 

to investment and some basic social services in Greece. 

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Given that the largest share of the debt is owed to Greece's European partners, this is the 

opportune time for the IMF to disengage from financing Greece's adjustment program, At this 

time, Greece's outstanding debt to the IMF has dropped to less than $14 billion, while its debt to 

European partners remains over $200 billion. 

Contradictions revealed in IMF Eurozone programs 

Lending to Eurozone members has been an unusual situation for the IMF. The ECB placed itself 

as a member of the troika, along with the lMF and the European Commission (EC), when 

normally a country's central bank is part of the country team negotiating with the IMF. The 

central bank is typically expected to make commitments as to its path for monetary policy, or its 

intentions regarding bank supervision, if the central bank has the responsibility for bank 

regulation. 

The Greece program revealed the conflicting priorities among the involved partners: 

• European countries were not meeting their self imposed fiscal deficit targets and were not 

effectively enforcing their own internal fiscal rules, undercutting their ability to impose 

conditionality on Eurozone crisis countries. 

• Europe looked to the IMF to impose that conditionality, but the IMF is a crisis resolution 

institution focused on restoring basic macroeconomic stability using traditional monetary, 

fiscal, financial sector and exchange rate policies. This crisis resolution approach should 

stabilize domestic finances and limit economic contraction while restoring debt 

sustainability. 

• In the past, the IMF left longer term 'structural' measures, such as labor market, pension, 

or judicial reform for the country to tackle over time, perhaps with the assistance of other 

multilateral institutions or bilateral partners. As Greece in particular made little progress 

in these areas needed for fiscal sustainability, the IMF included such structural reforms in 

its programs. Without sufficient funding or debt relief to cushion the economic 

downturn, political support for reform dissipated and Greece's program performance fell 

short. 

• As these internal inconsistencies became more obvious, EU and Eurozone institutions 

nonetheless insisted that their own institutions be repaid, putting pressure on the IMF to 

join in financing packages. 

• Greece delayed repayment to the IMF briefly in 2015 and fell into arrears. The ESM 

ultimately found a way to enable temporary financing for Greece, which allowed Greece 

to repay the IMF. But European partners' seeming disregard for the IMF's preferred 

creditor status, or top ranking among all creditors, raised concerns regarding Europe's 

willingness to recognize the IMF's paramount role. 

The Eurozone as a monetary union creates unique challenges for the JMF. Under the IMF 

Articles of Agreement, each member country is entitled to seck financial assistance, recognizing 

that the IMF imposes conditions on that lending in order to achieve economic viability and 

secure high probability of repayment. Countries come to the IMF to borrow foreign exchange, 

the global reserve currencies that the country needs to pay for imports or service its external 

obligations. 

5 
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The 'foreign exchange' the European crisis countries needed was their own domestic currency, 

the Euro, created by their own central bank, the European Central Bank. In that respect, it was 

unprecedented for Eurozone members to borrow Euros, a global reserve currency, from IMF 

members which are not part of the Eurozone and which hold Euros as part of their foreign 

exchange reserves. Eurozone members should be able to secure Euros directly from their own 

central bank, the ECB, which creates Euros for its members. 

IMF Staff View of Lending to Greece 

The IMF staff have undertaken several reviews of their European programs, the most recent 

being the Ex-Post Evaluation of the 2012IMF Greece Extended Fund Facility which was 

published this past winter. Included below are some of the key concerns raised by IMF staff in 

this recent review: 

• IMF staff are not certain that they have the information needed to evaluate the health of 

Greece's banks, due to fears that European regulators are not sharing all the relevant 

information. They are also concerned that European policies regarding bank regulation 

may not coincide with measures that IMF staff feel are needed to address banking sector 

weakness. 

• IMF staff note that few countries have maintained very tight fiscal policies for many 

years, as the European partners arc assuming Greece will do to achieve debt 

sustainability. Staff also worry that insufficient attention is being given to broadening the 

tax base and instead EU partners push higher rates on a small base, further reducing 

producer incentives to invest or hire new workers. 

• IMF staff point to Greece choosing to repay other creditors while briefly falling into 

arrears to the IMF in summer 2015, contrary to the Fund's internationally respected 

preferred creditor status. The European Stability Mechanism (ESM) includes in its treaty 

recognition of the IMF' s priority status among creditors, but this does not cover the bulk 

of the European partners' financing for Greece, which predates ESM lending to Greece. 

Europeans condition future support on Greece continuing its agreed economic reforms. 

That provides little assurance if Greece falls short and European partners cease providing 

new financing, as happened when Greece fell into arrears to the IMF in 2015. 

• Finally, stafTnote that the JMF still has not established a policy for lending to countries 

that are in a monetary or currency union. 

Next steps for the IMF 

The lMF is planning to discuss these concerns this summer, according to its work program, 

which includes conditionality in currency unions among policy items for Executive Board 

consideration. Development of a Fund wide policy is past due. 

In sum, just as the IMF has formalized its approach on exceptional access (or large programs) the 

IMF should formalize its approach to program countries in reserve currency monetary unions. 

This could help restore the IMF's principle of uniformity of treatment among all its members. 

6 
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The approach should include a process for the JMF to participate in formulating the country's 

economic reform program and monitoring its performance, without necessarily providing 

financial support. 

{[the country requests JMF.financing (a right established in the JMF's Articles of Agreement), 

the monetary union should respect the IMP's lead role in program design and debt sustainability 

assessments. 

An IMF policy on conditionality in currency unions should include the following elements: 

• The role of the central bank- the monetary union central bank should include the 

borrowing country in its normal monetary policy operations; 

• The role of currency union fiscal institutions- these institutions should specify the 

resources and timing of flows that will be provided to the borrowing country, ranging 

from loans to public investment commitments; 

• The role of the currency union's banking regulator- regulators should specify the nature 

of their supervisory requirements and range of their support to a borrowing country's 

banking sector and importantly, share data with the IMF and defer to the IMF's policy 

conditionality requirements; 

• The IMF financing role the IMF contribution to a financing package should be 

relatively small. A return to shorter term standby arrangements, instead of extended fund 

facilities with I 0 year maturities, should be expected and the levels of IMF financing 

should be kept within normal limits. 

• Program conditionality should adhere to IMF norms and currency union institutions 

should defer to alllMF requirements. 

• The currency union· s members and lending institutions should explicitly recognize the 

preferred creditor status of the IMF, including with regard to their earlier disbursements. 

Conclusion 

The IMF, European creditors, and Greece have agreed on Greece's policy package for the next 

year, now before Greece's Parliament. Discussions are ongoing as to the extent of the 

commitments the European creditors will make at this time for future debt relief for Greece. As 

noted above, the IMF is insisting on more specificity in order to assess whether Greece will 

achieve debt sustainability. 

The Europeans remain reluctant to provide concrete promises, stating that Greece could achieve 

debt sustainability by adhering to tight fiscal positions for many years, which the IMF does not 

believe is feasible or desirable. These divergent positions reinforce the conclusion that the 

European partners should finish the last year of the Greece program without the IMF, as they 

have managed to do for the past two years. European institutions can facilitate financing to 

enable Greece to meet debt payments this summer, as they did in 2015. 

A European decision to assume full responsibility for restoring Greece's economic vitality could 

be a first step in recognizing that the long term viability of the currency union rests on the 

7 
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members becoming a union and not a collection of widely divergent economies. The new 

President of France has made some suggestions to move towards centralized fiscal activities, 

although Germany and other stronger economies remain reluctant to centralize more government 

activities in European Union institutions. 

Taking initial steps towards a fiscal union could lead to a strong European economy instead of a 

group of a few exceptionally strong economies carrying several economically weaker partners. 

German recognition that a successful union will entail more internal sharing along with France's 

commitments to its own needed structural reforms could form the basis for a stronger future 

Europe, which would contribute to higher global growth and financial stability benefiting all 

countries. 

The IMF cannot deliver that, only European citizens and their governments can. 

8 
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~ 

~ Congressional Research Service 

Informing the legislative dPbate since 1914 

Statement of 

Rebecca M. Nelson 

Specialist in International Trade and Finance 

Before 

Committee on Financial Services 

Subcommittee on Monetary Policy and Trade 

U.S. House of Representatives 

Hearing on 

lfESl'IMONY 

"Lessons from the IMF' s Bailout of Greece" 

May 18,2017 

CRS TESTIMONY 

Congressional Research Service 

7-5700 

www.crs.gov 

Prepared for Congre-ss -------------------------·----------··------------·----- -----·---------
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Congressional Research Service 

Chairman Barr, Ranking Member Moore, and Members of the Subcommittee, thank you for the 

opportunity to appear before you today on behalf of the Congressional Research Service to discuss 

"Lessons from the IMF's Bailout of Greece." As requested, my testimony focuses on the implications of 

the International Monetary Fund (IMF) programs in Greece, particularly their impact on the IMF's 

capacity to deploy its resources responsibly and effectively. 

IMF Involvement in the Greek Crisis 

The International Monetary Fund (JMF) is an international organization whose primary purpose is to 

ensure stability of the international monetary system.' The United States is the IMF's largest shareholder 

and plays a key role in shaping IMF policies and programs. IMF membership has grown from 30 

countries in 1945 to 189 countries today.' 

The IMF's role in the global economy has evolved over the past 70 years. The IMF was originally created 

to oversee a system of pegged exchange rates and provide financing to countries facing temporary 

balance-of-payments crises associated with currency misalignments. In the 1970s, the system of pegged 

exchange rates broke down, and the United States and several other major economies adopted floating 

exchange rates. New challenges in the global economy emerged, and the IMF began extending emergency 

loans to cotmtries facing a broader range of banking, debt, and currency crises. The IMF played a key role 

in responding to major international financial crises, including the 1980s debt crisis, the Mexican crisis in 

I 994-1995, the Asian financial crisis in 1997-I 998, the Argentine crisis in 2000-200 l, and the global 

financial crisis of2008-2010. The IMF's track record in crises has been scrutinized, and at times has been 

characterized by some critics as bailing out profligate governments and imposing austerity policies that 

have harsh social consequences.3 

In recent years, the most challenging economic crisis facing the IMF has been Greece. 4 The Greek crisis 

is rooted in concerns about its public debt and finances, although the crisis exposed broader issues with 

Greece's banking sector, structural policies, and membership in the Eurozone. 5 The IMF approved two 

financial assistance progran1s for Greece, co-financed with European creditors, in 20 l 0 and 2012. For the 

IMF as an institution, the stakes were high: the programs were among the largest in IMF history, Greece 

was the first advanced economy to borrow from the IMF in several decades, and failing to contain the 

crisis could have undermined recovery from the global financial crisis. 

Seven years into the crisis, the IMF's record in Greece is mixed. The IMF programs-in conjunction with 

measures taken by the Eurozone countries and the European Central Bank (ECB}--succeeded in ringfencing the crisis and preventing spillover from Greece to larger economies in the Eurozone and the 

broader global economy. However, Greece's economy has not yet recovered. Greece's debt is higher than 

1 For more on the IMF, sec CRS Report R420 19, International A1onetary Fund: Background and Issues jhr Congress, by Martin 

A Weiss. 

2 International Monetary Fund (JMF), List of A-1embers. March 7, 2017. 

3 For example, see Allen H. Meltzer, "The Report of the International Financial Institution Advisory Commission: Comments on 

the Critics," in The !MF and its Critics: Reform of the Global Financial Architecture. ed. David Vines and Christopher L. Gilbert 

(Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 106-124: Alexander E. Kentikelenis, Thomas H. Stubbs. and Lawrence P. King, "IMF 

Conditionality and Development Space, 1985-2014." Revint' of International Political Economy, vol. 23, no. 4 (2016), pp. 543-

582. 

4 For more on the Greek crisis, see CRS Report R44155, The Greek Debt Crisis: Overview and Implications for the United 

States, coordinated by Rebecca M. Nelson. 

5 The Eurozone is a group of 19 of the 28 European Union (EU) member states which have adopted a common currency, the 

euro. 
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Congressional Research Service 

before the crisis, its economy has contracted by 25%, and one in five Greeks is unemployed." In the 

summer of2015, the Greek government did not make its scheduled repayments to the IMF. It is unusual 

for any country to miss a payment to the fMF, and Greece became the first advanced economy in the 

institution's history to do so. Although Greece later made these payments, it raised questions about the 

Fund's exposure to Greece, one of its largest borrowers at the time (Figure 1 ). Greece remains cut off 

from international capital markets and relies on a third rescue program financed by European creditors, 

without IMF participation. 

Figure I. Use of IMF Credit and Loans 

Billions US$ 

$160 

$120 

$80 

$40 

$0 

" "'"' 00 

a. 0'\0. 00 "' 

rl ........ " "' "' 0 rl 

"' 00 00 "' "' "' m "' "' "' ,..; ,., ,., rl ,... 

II! Rest of World 

N "'"'"' "' " "' "' 0 

~ ~g;g; ~ "' "' ~ 0 

~ "' 0 ,..; ,.; ,., ,..; ,., N 

Source: IMF, International Financial Statistics. 

Greece II Cyprus~ Ireland, and Portugal 

,... "' m "' "' "' .... "' "' 0 ,... "' "' .,. gg 0 g g gg 0 g .-< .-< rl ,... .... 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 N N N "' N NN N N NN N N N 

"' .... 

0 

N 

Throughout the Greek crisis, analysts have pointed to missteps taken by a numher of actors, including the 

Greek govemment, private banks that lent money to Greece, Eurozone leaders and institutions, and the 

!MF. Given the broader role of the IMF in in the global economy, however, the fMF's handling of the 

crisis in Greece has been widely examined, including by independent analysts and the !MF's lndependent 

Evaluation Office (IE0)7 

The !MF has defended its policy response in Greece and has taken steps to address some of the issues 

raised by the Greek crisis.' The TMF changed its policy advice on debt restructuring and austerity during 

the crisis, declined to participate in a third program for Greece due to concems about debt sustainability 

and economic reforms, and revised its lending policies largely based on its experience in Greece. The 

6 IMF, World Economic Out/ookDatahase. Apri12017. 

7 for example, Desmond Lachman, "Gr~~k Lessons for the IMF," T7u' I !ill. Ft:hruary 20, 2015~ Ashoka Mody, ··The IMF's Big 

Greek Mistake;' Bloomberg Viel-i', April21, 2015; Canncn M. Reinhart and Christoph Trcbesch, '·The International Monetary 

Fund: 70 Years of Reinvention," Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 30. no. I (Winter 2016). 3-28; Arvind Subramanian, 

'·How the IMF Failed Greece." Project Syndicate, August 13, 2015; Edwin M. Truman, Crises: Review 

of a Report from the Independent Evaluation Office. Peterson Institute f{)f International Economics, Policy Brief 16~13, 

September 2016; Independent Evaluation Otlice of the IMF, Greece<· Et: Post Evaluation of Ex~ceptional Access under the 2010 

Stand-IJ.v Arrangement, 2013; Independent Evaluation Office of the IMF, 7he l.MF and the Crises in Greece, Ireland, and 

Portugal, 2016. 

a For example. sec Olivier Blanchard, "Greece: Past Critiques and the Path Fonvard,'' IMf I31og, July 9, 2015. 
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lMF also financed programs in three other Eurozonc countries-Ireland (20 !0), Portugal (20 II), and 

Cyprus (20 13}-which are broadly viewed as successful. 

However, the IMF programs in Greece raise a numher of broader policy challenges for the IMF that 

remain outstanding and are likely to be relevant in future crises. These include questions, discussed in 

greater detail below, about the size and duration ofiMF financing, co-financing arrangements between tbe 

IMF and other creditors, IMF policy flexibility and accountability, lMF policy towards currency unions, 

and the seniority ofiMF financing. 

Should there be limits on IMF financing? 

The size of Greece's lMF programs was unprecedented. The amount a country can borrow from the IMF 

is tied to its financial commitment to the !MF, or its "quota" at the IMF. 9 Generally, the more a country 

contributes to the IMF, the more it can borrow from the IMF during crises. During the Em·ozone crisis, 

normal access to IMF financing was capped at 600% of the borrowing country's quota, with procedures 

for approving larger programs under exceptional circumstances. 10 The lMF programs in Greece, Ireland, 

and Portugal were three to live times the normal limit, and the largest programs relative to quota in IMF 

history (Figure 2). Although the Eurozone programs were extreme examples, they reflect a broader trend. 

lMF programs increased relative to the borrower's quota starting in 2008, with large programs in Iceland, 

Latvia, Hungary, Romania, and Ukraine, among others. Median IMF program size jumped from 75% of 

the borrowing country's quota in the 1980s to 400% in 2008-2017. 11 

Greece's programs also highlight a pattern for some countries to become repeat or ''serial'' borrowers 

from the IMF, even though lMF financing was originally designed to provide short-term balance-ofpayments support. With Greece's back-to-back programs, the government received IMF support for a 

total of 5.5 years (between May 2010 and January 2016). Seven years after its first program, Greece 

continues to rely on official sector tinancing, although not currently from the IMF. While the other 

Eurozone countries (Ireland, Portugal, and Cyprus) successfully stabilized their economies during a single 

IMF program, some countries are frequent boJTOwers from the IMF. A quarter of TMF members ( 48 

countries) have been on IMF programs for more than half of the years they have belonged to the lMF; 

more than a third (70 countries) have been on TMF programs more than 40% of time since joining the 

IMF. 12 These serial borrowers include a mix of low-income and emerging-market economies. 

'~A country's quota at the IMF is hroadly tied to Its size in the global economy, hut other factors, including openness to trade. 

economic variability, and the size of international reserves. also play a role. 

10 Nonnal access to IMF resources during this time period also included a limit of200% of quota for any 12~month period during 

the program. in addition to the 600% of quota limit cumulatively over the lifetime of the program. 

n IMF, Financial Data Query Tool. Based on amounts when agreements vverc appwvcd: some programs were "augmented'' 

during the course of the program (l(x example. Russia in 1998). Median IMF program 75%ofthe borrowing country's quota in 

the 1980s, 50% in the 1990s, and 65% in the 2000s. I:xcluding precautionary IMF programs, the median program size since 2008 

is300%. 

12 Carmen M. Reinhart and Christoph Trcbesch. "The International Monetary Fund: 70 Years of Reinvention:' Journal of 

Rconomic Perspectives. vol. 30, no. I (Winter 2016), p. 14. 
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Figure 2. IMF Programs, 1952-2017 

%of borrowing country's quota 

3500% 

3000% 

2500% 

2000% 

1500% 

1000% 

500% 

0% 

Source: IMF, Financial Data Query Tool. 

3,212% 

Greece{2010) 

2,305% 

2,322% Portugal (2011) Ireland {2010) 

~ 

2,159% 

Greece (2012) 

Notes:. Program amounts when agreement was approved. Programs included those funded from the IMF's General 

Resources Account; figure does not include programs funded by the IMF's concessionallending facility. 

The trend towards larger and repeated !MF programs raises questions about whether there are limits to 

what IMF financing can and should be doing. On one hand, lack of clear limits on IMF financing risks 

moral hazard: that governments will not adopt prudent economic policies if there is an understanding that 

the IMF will "bail them out," even at a high cost or over a long time period. Larger and repeated 

programs can pose risks to donor government contributions to the IMF. More generally, !MF financing 

was originally designed to help countries address short-term liquidity issues relating to currency 

misalignments. IMF financing was not originally intended to address the types of crises the IMF has 

increasingly confronted in recent decades: countries grappling with serious banking or debt crises, where 

there are questions about the country's solvency and the country's financing needs are large and longterm. This raises questions ahoul whether !MF financing has strayed from its original mandate, and how 

large, longer-term IMF programs fit into the broader intemational financial architecture, particularly with 

the World Bank and other multilateral development banks also focused on large, long-term development 

financing. 

On the other hand, there are risks to limiting the resources the IMF can deploy during crises. Large IMF 

programs post-2008 reflect the severity of the global financial crisis, and it is not clear that the global 

economy would have been better off if the IMF had taken a less aggressive response. Large programs 

post-2008 also reflect the fact that IMF resources had not increased at the same rate of global GDP and 

international economic activity-" Additionally, serial!MF programs reflect the changing nature of 

13 This was a key argument for doubling IMF quota resources, which was implemented in 2016. For more on the IMF refonn 

package. sec CRS Report R42844~ /AfF Reforms: 1:,.-suesfor Congress, by Rebecca M. Nelson and Martin A Weiss. 
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Congressional Research Service 

economic crises, as the types of crises facing countries in recent decades are associated with deeper and 

longer drops in economic output. 14 If there is a compelling case for large and repeated IMF programs, 

which is itself a hotly debated question, there may still be questions about whether IMF policies should be 

reformed to reflect the shift in types of crises to which the IMF is responding, and how programs can be 

designed to minimize moral hazard. 

Should the IMF co-finance programs with other official creditors and if 

so, under what circumstances? 

At the outset of the Greek crisis, the IMF entered an unprecedented co-financing arrangement with 

official European creditors. While the IMF provided a minority share of the total resources in the Greek 

packages (Figure 3), co-financing was not by itself unusual in an !MF program. For example, bilateral 

commitments supplemented IMF resources during Mexico's crisis in 1994-1995 and the Asian financial 

crisis in 1997-1998. 15 However, it was unprecedented for other official creditors to play a formal role with 

the IMF in designing and overseeing the program, potentially limiting the independence of the Fund. 

Figure 3.1MF Programs in Greece 

' '~' ,,, ' 

€$0(~ltlllr,c 

.,W'"'til.tM 2010 

€110($146) 

:' ', '' '>, " ~ ,'_:\ ;'' '-~ 

eW?v•lila 2012 

€173($222) 

Europeans 

81MF 

Currency in biiJions 

2015 

€86($95) 

Source: Independent Evaluation Office of the IMF, The IMF and the Crises in Greece, Ireland, and Portugal, 2016, p. 4; 

European Commission, Greece: The Third Economic Adjustment Programme. 

Notes: Euros converted to U.S. dollars using exchange rate from the year the program was approved. 

Co-financing limited the IMF's financial commitment to Greece, but the lEO found that the so-called 

"troika" arrangement of the IMF, European Commission, and ECB constrained IMF policy decisions and 

potentially subjected IMF staffs technical judgements to political pressure. 16 For example, in 2010, some 

European creditors insisted debt restructuring should not be on the table for Greece. The concerns of the 

Europeans reportedly overrode JMF staff concerns about the sustainability of Greek debt and the use of 

debt restructuring as a regular part of the IMF crisis response toolkit. Although the official positions on 

debt restructuring for Greece evolved and Greece's private debt was restructured in 2012, the delay meant 

that a large portion of the 20 I 0 program was used to repay Greece's private creditors, and private sector 

14 Cannen M. Reinhart and Christoph Trebesch, "The International Monetary Fund: 70 Years of Reinvention," Journal of 

Economic Perspectives, vol. 30, no. l (Winter 2016), pp, 12-13. 

15 For more information on IMF and bilateral commitments during key programs in 1990s and early 2000s, see Nouricl Roubini 

and Brad Sct..:.;cr, Bailouts or Bail-ins? Responding to Financial Crises in Emerging Economies (Institute fOr International 

Economics. 2004), Table 4.1. 

16 lndepcndent Evaluation Office of the IMF, The JMF and the Crises in Greece, Ireland. and Portugal, 2016. 
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debt was largely replaced by official sector debt. When Greece did restructure its private debt in 2012, it 

had limited impact on Greece's overall debt level. 

The IMF's experience with the troika arrangement raises questions about whether the lMF should cofinance programs with other creditors. Based on the experience in Greece, co-financing can be helpful in 

reducing the IMF's financial commitment in a crisis, but problems can arise when the IMF and cofinancing partners are not aligned in terms of goals or beliefs about the correct policy response. If cofinancing is desirable, there are questions about how to structure co-financing arrangements to maximize 

effectiveness. This includes the optimal size of IMF financing relative to financing from other creditors 

and the process by which the IMF designs and oversees programs with co-financing partners. 

The IMF does not have a clear policy on co-financing arrangements, although the issue is likely to remain 

salient in coming years. 17 The financing needs of countries in crisis have increased over the past several 

decades, 18 and regional financing arrangements, which provide financial support to member countries 

experiencing financial difficulties, have proliferated. In addition to the new Eurozone rescue fund (the 

European Stability Mechanism), examples of such funds include the Arab Monetary Fund, the BRTCS 

(Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) Contingent Reserve Arrangement, the Chiang-Mai 

Initiative, the Eurasian Fund for Stabilization and Development, and the Latin American Reserve Fund. 

How much policy flexibility should the IMF have? 

In an unusual step, the IMF revised its lending safeguards in 20 I 0 to allow the first Greek program to go 

forward despite misgivings about the sustainability of Greece's debt. Greece's financing needs were large, 

but Greece did not meet the criteria required for accessing loans above the normal IMF lending limits 

(referred to as "exceptional access" to IMF financing). Specifically, IMF staff could not certify that 

Greece met one of the exceptional access criteria--that Greece's debt would be sustainable under the 

program over the medium-term with high probability. However, the IMF believed that the risks from 

Greece to the global economy were more significant than the risks of extending a large loan to a countty 

with a potentially unsustainable level of debt. The Fund changed the exceptional access criteria to make 

an exemption for countries that posed a systemic threat to the global economy, allowing the Greek 

program to go forward. 

The rollout of the policy change was opaque and controversial, because the merits and drawbacks of the 

policy tor the IMF were not discussed separately from the exigencies of the Greek crisis. 19 The "systemic 

exemption" was also criticized for increasing the likelihood that the IMF program in Greece would fail, 

posing a risk to IMF rcsources. 20 Greece's missed payments to the lMF in the summer of 2015 are cited as 

evidence that these concems were founded. However, the "systemic exemption" was also invoked for 

successful programs in Ireland and Portugal. 21 IMF staff debated repealing the systemic exemption in 

17 IMF, Stocktaking the Fund's Engagement with Regional Financing Arrangements, April J 1, 2013~ lMF, Crisis Program 

Review, November 9, 2015. 

l& Carmen M. Reinhart and Christoph Trebesch, "The International Monetary Fund: 70 Years of Reinvention,'' Journal of 

Economic Perspectives, voL 30, no. 1 (Winter 2016), pp. 3-28. 

19 Paul Blustein, Laid Low: 7he JMF. The Euro Zone, and the First Rescue of Greece, Centre for International Governance 

Innovation, CIGI Papers No. 61, April 21 05; Susan Schadler, Living with Rules: The HfF's Exceptional Access Framework and 

the 2010 Stand-By Arrangement with Greece, lEO Background Paper, 2016. 

20 John B. Taylor, "Obama and the IMF Are Unhappy with Congress? Good," Wall Street .Journal, February 13, 2014; John B. 

Taylor, "The Lesson Greece's Lenders Forgot:' Wall Street Journal, July 9, 2015. 

21 Portugal and Ireland's economics were stabili:?.ed at the conclusion of the programs. The governments were able to re-enter 

capital markets and repay the IM:F early. Edward M. Truman, ''IMF Exceptional Access and Reform Legislation: Do Not Link 

the Two Issues," Peterson Institute ofinternational Economics, July 23, 2015. 
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2014 and 2015.22 The IMF repealed it in 2016, following congressional legislation that conditioned U.S. 

participation in a broader IMF reform package on its repeal (P.L. 114-113).23 

The 20 I 0 decision to change a key IMF lending safeguard raises questions about the appropriate balance 

between IMF flexibility during crises and adherence to IMF safeguards that protect JMF resources. 

Providing the JMF discretion to make policy changes allows the IMF to tap its expertise in unforeseen 

and time-sensitive crises. The risk is that the IMF may make policy changes that donor governments do 

not support and make the IMF less predictable as an institution. Additionally, the procedure by which the 

IMF made the policy change in2010 raises governance questions relating to transparency and 

accountability. 

How should the IMF engage with members of currency unions? 

Greece's membership in the Eurozone is another unusual feature of the IMF programs in Greece. 

Eurozone members share a common currency and monetary policy, while largely retaining national 

control over fiscal and banking policies. The unnsual split in economic policy responsibilities between 

national and Eurozone-level authorities complicates IMF surveillance and programs. 24 While there is 

some precedent for IMF support of countries tbat are members of currency unions (recent examples 

include St. Kitts, Benin, and Burkina Faso), Greece was unusual due to the size of its economy and the 

euro's status as a major reserve currency." 

The IMF programs in Greece, a~ well as in Ireland, Pm1ugal, and Cyprus, treated the crises as crises in 

individual members of the Eurozone, rather than a crisis of the Eurozone as a whole.26 The conditionality 

focused on policies directly under the purview of the individual member governments, such as fiscal 

policies and regulations. Even though the IMF coordinated closely with tbe ECB, IMF programs did not 

include conditionality on policies that applied to the currency union as a whole, particularly monetary and 

exchange rate policies. In most IMF programs, such policies would normally be subject to conditionality. 

Additionally, lMF programs in the Eurozone also did not specifically address structural imbalances within 

the currency union that may have contributed to the crisis, particularly persistent current account 

imbalances within the Eurozone, or policy reforms in stronger Eurozone members that could have 

supported the crisis response, including policies to boost domestic demand. 

The lMF's experience in Greece raises questions about bow the IMF should engage effectively with 

currency unions and specific members of a currency union. By focusing on the individual member states 

in the Eurozone rather than the Eurozone as a whole, the IMF programs focused on a narrower set of 

policy tools than was needed to address the fundamentals of the crisis and imposed more costs of the 

crisis adjustment on specific currency union members. However, it is not clear what authority the IMF has 

over currency unions as a whole, or members of currency unions that are not in crisis. 

22 IMF, The Fund's Lending Framework and Sovereign Debt- -Preliminary Considerations, June 2014. IMP, The Fund's Lending 

Framework and Sovereign Debt--~Further LOnsiderations, April9, 2015. 

23 JMF. '"·IMF Survey: IMF Rcfonns Policy for Exceptional Access Lending;' January 29, 2016. For more on the IMF refonn 

package, see CRS Report R42844, IMFReforms: Issues for Congress, by Rebecca M. Nelson and Martin A. Weiss. 

24 For example, see Adam Feibelman, "Europe and the Future oflntemational Monetary Law," vol. 22, no. I (2013). 

25 lndcpcndent Evaluation Office of the IMF, Greece: Ex Post Evaluation of Exceptional Access under the 2010 Stand-By 

Arrangement, 2013. 

26 Edwin M. Tmman, The !AfF and Euro Area Crises: Revi€!1-1' of a Report from the Independent Evaluation Ofjlce, Peterson 

Institute for International Economics, Policy Brief 16-13, September 2016. 
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The IMF does not have clear guidelines for designing programs in currency unions or currency union 

members. 27 Questions about IMF programs in currency unions may arise in the future. In addition to the 

Eurozone ( 19 members), other currency unions in the global economy include the Eastern Caribbean 

Currency Union (6 members), the Central African Economic and Monetary Community (11 members),28 

and the West African Economic and Monetary Union (8 members) (Figure 4). Together, about a quarter 

of the IMF's total membership currently belongs to a currency union. An additional 7 EU members are 

expected to join the Eurozone after meeting specific entry criteria. 

Eastern Caribbean 

Currency Union 

Figure 4. Currency Unions 

West African Economic 

and Monetary Union 

Central African Economic 

and Monetary Community 

Source: Created by the Congressional Research Service. 

How secure is the IMF's preferred creditor status? 

Eurozone 

When the Greek government fell behind on payments to the IMF in the summer of2015, it continued to 

meet its debt payments to private bondholders.29 This broke with the long-held convention that IMF has 

"preferred creditor status:" distressed countries borrowing from the IMF are expected to give priority to 

payments to the IMF over payments to all other creditors.30 The Greek government faced strong 

incentives to repay private creditors: the payments to private creditors falling due were small, and there 

was a market perception that a default on private debt would be "calamitous. "31 The period in which 

Greece was in arrears to the IMF was relatively short (less than one month). The Greek government 

repaid the missed payments to the lMF after reaching a deal with European creditors that unlocked fresh 

disbursements of funds. However, the period in which Greece was in arrears created substantial 

uncettainty about the stability of !MF finances, since Greece was one of its largest borrowers. 

27 IMF. Crisis Program Review, November 9, 2015~ Independent Evaluation Office of the IMF, The JA1F and the Crises in 

Greece. Ireland, and Portugal, 2016. 

18 Anguil1a and Montserrat are also members of the ECCU. but are not independent IMF members. 

29 Leo Lewis, "'Greece Makes Samurai Bond Repayment," Financial Times, July 13, 2015. 

30 Susan Schadler, 17le l.MF's Preferred Creditor Status: Does it Still A-fake Sense Ajier the Euro Crisis?, Policy Brief No. 37, 

March 2014. 

11 Leo Lewis, "Greece Makes Samurai Bond Repayment/' Financial Times, July 13.2015. 
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~s;ongressional Research Servlce 

The IMF's preferred creditor status is viewed as critical to allowing the IMF to work effectively as a 

lender of last resort, safeguarding IMF resources, and enabling the IMF to charge relatively low interest 

rates. 32 The "seniority" ofiMF financing is not written in law, but is agreed in principle by IMF member 

countries and broadly understood by market participants. Until the Greek crisis, there was a strong 

historical record of distressed governments defaulting on other creditors (private creditors, bilateral 

creditors, and other multilateral organizations) prior to missing any payments to the !MF. 33 lt is unclear 

whether Greece's temporary arrears to the IMF arc a one-off deviation from a strong historical record, or 

whether Greece's policy choices set a new precedent for future crises. There arc questions about how the 

IMF could respond if govemments and private investors start questioning seniority of IMF financing, 

including whether the IMF could continue to function in effect as the lender of last resort in the global 

economy. 

Conclusion 

In the Greek crisis, the IMF is in many ways in unchatted territory: committing significant financing in 

back-to-back programs, entering an unusual co-financing arrangement, chat1ging its lending policies, 

designing conditionality for a crisis in a major currency union, and facing temporary missed payments 

from one of its largest borrowers. However, the Greek crisis unfolded on the heels of the glohal financial 

crisis of 2008-20 I 0, and there was broad agreement that the international economy was too fragile to 

sustain another systemic shock. Additionally, the !MF was not the only actor taking extraordinary 

measures to protect the global economy. Central banks were pursuing unconventional quantitative casing 

programs, many governments were pursuing substantial fiscal stimulus measures, and world leaders 

overhauled the international framework for economic cooperation, with the elevation of the G-20 as the 

prominent forum for iutemational economic coordination. The IMF was widely viewed as a critical part 

of the response to the global financial crisis; in April 2009, G-20 leaders committed to tripling the IMF's 

resources to ensure it could respond effectively to the global financial crisis. 34 There is broad consensus 

that the IMF contributed to stemming contagion from Greece, consistent with its mandate of promoting 

international monetary stability. 

However, seven years after the first IMF program for Greece was approved, the economic crisis there 

remains acute and there is no clear long-term plan for stabilizing the Greek economy. Although a number 

of factors beyond the control of the IMF may have contributed to the current situation in Greece, many 

observers have noted policy missteps by the Fund and argued that the Greek crisis has tarnished the IMF's 

reputation." 

The IMF is an international organization that has evolved over time. After a number of major crises, 

outside analysts and the IMF itself have evaluated the crisis response, leading to changes in IMF policies 

going forward. The IMP's experience in Greece may be another pivotal crisis that leads to a broader 

discussion of!MF policies and its role in the global economy. This could include examination of the 

extent to which the size and scope of recent IMF programs have veered from its original mandate to 

provide finat1cial support for temporary balance-of-payments crises. In addition, issues could include the 

IMF's interactions with other financing organiz.ations, IMF safeguards that ensure the Fund's 

accountability, and the IMF's role as a lender oflast resort in the global economy. 

32 Susan Schadler, The !JIF's Preferred Creditor Status,· Does it Still Make Sense After the Euro Crisis?, Policy BriefNo. 37. 

March 2014. 

33 Matthias Schiegl, Christoph Trebesch, and Mark Wright. ··Sovereign Debt Repayments: Evidence on Seniority:' lrox, August 

II. 2015. 

H G~20, I,ondon Summit, l,caders' Statement, April2, 2009. 

35 For example, Shawn Donnan, "IMF under Pressure in Washington over Greek Bailout," Financial Times, March 17, 2017. 
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German Conservative Euro-MP Breaks Ranks Over IMF Role in Greek Bailout 

By: Gernot Heller, Michael Nienaber, and edited by John Stonestreet 

Reuters 

February 16, 2017 

IMF participation is no longer crucial for Greece's bailout programme, a German euro-lawmaker 

close to Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Thursday, breaking ranks with Berlin's official line 

that the programme would end if the Fund pulled out. 

The International Monetary Fund has yet to decide if it will fund the bailout, Greece's third, and 

says Athens can only hit mandated fiscal targets if it is granted significant debt relief. 

The German government- gearing up for what are forecast to be close-run national elections in 

September- opposes debt relief, and also says the current programme could only continue if the 

Fund joined in. 

But Manfred Weber, who leads the conservative bloc in the European Parliament, said that the 

lMF's role was no longer crucial. 

"If the IMF insists on a debt cut, then one should let it go," he told the Sueddeutsche Zeitung 

newspaper. "Europe can stand on its mvn feet now." 

The impasse between Greece's international lenders over the country's fiscal targets has slowed 

progress on a bailout review and rekindled fears of a new financial crisis in Europe. 

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeublc said last week that Greece would have to leave 

the euro zone if it failed to meet its bailout commitments, while the IMF needed to stay on board. 

"(IMF involvement) is indispensable for us. That's what the Bundestag agreed on," Hans 

Michelbach, a senior member of Merkel's conservative bloc in the lower house of parliament, 

told Reuters on Thursday. 

The conservatives' parliamentary floor leader, Volker Kauder, told Focus magazine: "We insist 

on the commitments. And the International Monetary Fund must remain on board. Otherwise, we 

can't approve any further aid." 

Both Michelbach and Weber are senior members of the CSU, the Bavarian sister party of 

Merkel's CDU. 

The IMF argues that Greece will not achieve a targeted fiscal surplus before debt servicing costs 

of 3.5 percent of GDP unless it adopts more austerity measures and gets debt relief. 

The issue is crucial because the higher the surplus and the longer it is maintained, the less the 

need for further debt relief. 

Berlin, which agrees Greece needs more refonns to improve its competitiveness, believes the 

Fund can add credibility to the Greek bailout. 
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EU officials have called IMF projections "pessimistic". 

On Wednesday, European Commissioner for Economic and Financial Affairs Pierre Moscovici 

said the bailout review talks had made progress, but more action was needed to wrap them up. 

(Reporting by Gemot Heller and Michael Nienaber, editing by John Stonestreet) 

http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-curozone-greece-germany-imt~idUKKBN l5V 1 OS 
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German SPD Says Europe Can Back Athens Without the IMF 

By: Saran tis Michalopoulos 

EUROACTIV.gr 

.January 19,2017 

In an interview with Silddeutsche Zeitung, Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) deputy 

chairman Carsten Schneider insisted that the International Monetary Fund's (lMF) participation 

in the Greek bailout was not necessary. EURACTIV Greece repmts. 

"We need the IMF for its estimates and independence[ ... ] but not as a lender," Schneider noted. 

''As Europeans, we have the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), we are able to find funds in 

the capital markets," he added, stressing that the current bailout program can be funded without 

the IMF. 

The Syriza-led government has always opposed the IMF's participation in the bailout, criticising 

its firm stance in the negotiations. 

A few days before the controversial Greek referendum in July 2015, then Minister of State Nikos 

Pappas stated that Europe could continue "without the IMF". 

"Europe has the institutional dynamic to find solutions for the crisis without the IMF,'' he noted. 

On the other hand, Berlin has insisted since the very beginning of the Greek crisis that the IMF 

should remain part of the Greek programme. 

The German centre-left politician also said that IMF's involvement was an explicit desire of the 

conservatives, an idea which was not shared by his party. 

In a recent interview also with Suddeutsche Zeitung, German finance minister Wolfgang 

Schauble floated the idea that if the IMF decides to pull out, Europe could figure out its "own 

solution" within the eurozone. 

He added that such a solution should guarantee a strict implementation of the bailout's terms and 

be approved by the Gennan parliament. 

"If we continue solely then we will have to better guarantee the agreements[ ... ] this role could 

be assigned to the ESM," he emphasised. 

Commission sources cited the ESM Treaty when asked to comment on the matter. 

'The European Commission- in liaison with the European Central Bank (ECB) and, wherever 

possible, together with the IMF shall be entrusted with monitoring compliance with the 

conditionality attached to the financial assistance facility," a Commission official told 

euractiv.gr. 

What Athens says 
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Meanwhile, the Greek government seeks to conclude the second review of the country's bailout 

will at a Eurogroup on 26 January. 

Speaking yesterday (18 January) at the parliament, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said that 

the IMF could remain in the programme but just as a technical adviser. 

Commenting on the future relations between Athens and the Fund, Greek Finance Minister 

Euclid Tsakalotos ironically said: "If we continue to exceed our objectives and the IMF 

continues to make wrong predictions [on the Greek economy performance], all we can do then is 

to provide them with technical assistance". 

https://wwvv.euractiv .com/scction/euro-finance/news/german-spd-savs-curope-can-back-athenswithout-the-imf/ 
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Germany denies devising Greek rescue plan without IMF 

By: Gernot Heller 

Reuters 

January 18,2017 

Germany expects the International Monetary Fund to participate in Greece's bailout program, a 

finance ministry spokeswoman said on Wednesday, rejecting a newspaper report that Berlin was 

preparing for a deal without the global lender. 

Divisions over labor reforms, fiscal targets and debt relief have prevented Greece and its foreign 

lenders from concluding a compliance review of its current bailout program, the third since 2010. 

The IMF says it will only join in if this rescue is the country's last and it includes significant debt 

relief. 

Bild reported on Wednesday that Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble was preparing for a 

continuation of aid without the lMF - an option Greek officials said last week that the 

government in Athens would welcome. 

The German mass-market daily gave no source for the information. 

A spokeswoman for Schaeuble's ministry rejected the report. "We still expect an IMF 

participation," she said. "For us, this participation is promised and necessary." 

Schaeuble last week already raised the possibility of a new program for Greece without the IMF 

should the Fund decide to bow out. 

Bild said Schaeuble thinks the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), the euro zone's bailout 

fund, would be tapped to plug the hole left by aniMF departure. 

"Plan B'' 

Schaeuble, who argues that debt relief would take pressure off Greece to refonn its economy, has 

said he favors shifting some of the European Commission's task of enforcing euro zone budget 

rules to the ESM, which as a non-political body would be better positioned to impose 

compliance. 

An ESM spokesman told Reuters: "We continue to work hard so that the lMF remains engaged 

in Greece and pursues the work there with the European institutions." 

Bild also said Germany's Bundestag lower house of parliament would vote on a modified 

program before a general election in September. 

Lawmaker Eckhardt Rehberg, parliamentary spokesman on finance and budget issues for 

Chancellor Angela Merkel's CDU, said the Bundestag would have to vote on a new program if 

the IMF pulled out, "but I don't see such a scenario at the moment." 
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ESM Managing Director Klaus Regling said in an interview with Bloomberg TV this week that a 

bailout without the IMF was a "plan B." 

Greece's EU lenders want the country to achieve and maintain a primary surplus -after interest 

payments- of3.5 percent ofGDP beyond 2018, when its program ends. The IMF says that, 

unless Athens adopts more austerity measures and legislates them upfront, the surplus will only 

reach 1.5 percent. 

Greek government officials said last week that Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras- who is sagging in 

polls- would welcome an IMF exit, hoping it might help conclude the review without legislating 

more austerity now. 

To help break the impasse, Greece would be willing to discuss fiscal measures that would only 

be implemented if it missed budgetary targets after 2018. Tsipras said on Wednesday that Greece 

would conclude the second review of compliance with the program without legislating new 

measures beyond then. 

(Additional reporting by Michelle Martin and Andreas Rinke in Berlin and Renee Maltezou in 

Athens, and Tom Koerkemeier in Brussels; writing by Joseph Nasr.; editing by John Stonestreet 

and Richard Lough) 

http://www .reuters.com/artic le/us-eurozone-greece-schaeu ble-idU S KB N 152 OTX 'Jj 1=0 
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Commentary: The IMF must walk away from Greece 

By: Meg Lundsager 

Reuters 

May 17,2016 

The depth of distrust between Greece and its creditors grows increasingly clear as both sides 

resume negotiations for a new bailout program. 

The International Monetary Fund is demanding more European debt relief for Greece-- at a 

minimum, a longer payback period on its European Union loans. But Germany insists that the 

fund lend to Greece even if Athens receives no immediate additional debt relief. More relief 

would not be needed for "the coming years," German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble 

said. 

Yet, additional IMF loans would only paper over Greece's economic problems and postpone the 

reforms Athens needs to make to remain in the euro zone. Instead of more loans, the IMF should 

force Greece and its creditors to come up with long-tenn compromise solutions. 

Given Greece's poor record in meeting previous loan conditions, the Europeans seek Greek 

parliamentary approval of additional budget measures, imposed if Athens fails to meet its targets. 

This course would leave Greece still uncertain if, or how, its creditors might ease its debt burden. 

Such economic brinksmanship would also offer Greece little hope of real solution --which 

would include restoring private-sector confidence, attracting foreign investment and restarting 

growth. 

The most likely outcome, however, is that all parties blink. some kind of agreement is reached 

before Greece defaults -- and the cycle starts again. 

This papering over of widely divergent positions reflects the euro zone's collective failure to 

agree on an economic policy which the IMF cannot do for them. Given the 500-billion euros in 

Europe's substantial bailout fund, the European Stability Mechanism, the more than !50 nonEuropean members of the International Monetary Fund should tell Europe: "There will be no 

more IMF lending to Greece." 

Greece's crisis is a stark reflection of Europe's own internal problems. One way the euro zone 

could begin to solve them would be to create the conditions to generate economic growth across 

the continent. That means encouraging more investment spending, particularly in the 

economically weaker countries, and more consumption by cutting taxes in the stronger countries. 

By refusing to hand out new loans, the IMF would pressure euro-zonc countries to face up to the 

shared costs- as well as the benefits -- of preserving their monetary union. 

Because all euro-zone countries have reaped significant benefits from membership in the union. 

Germany, for example, has gained from partnering with weaker economies. The value of the 

euro reflects the overall region --not just Germany. Berlin's exports have boomed because the 
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euro is more depreciated than the deutschmark would be had there been no monetary union. The 

result is Germany has one of the world's largest trade and current account surpluses. 

The euro zone's weaker members, such as Greece and Portugal, have also benefited. Markets 

have demanded a far lower interest rate on their government debt than if they had not joined the 

euro zone-- though they did not share in the same export boom. 

As for sharing costs, Europe's European Stability Mechanism can now cover the costs of bailing 

out member governments in crisis. Europe has more than enough resources to manage a Greek 

adjustment program. 

Beyond that, Europe has lagged in agreeing on how to share costs beyond monetary union. It 

needs, for example, to institute common bank-resolution funds and pan-European deposit 

insurance. Both steps are critical to prevent one country's bank crisis from spreading to others. 

In addition, because Europe is not a United States of Europe, there is no effective overall 

commitment to support economic growth across the continent. As a result, there is also no 

enforcement mechanism for changing national economies to make them more competitive while 

remaining in the euro zone. 

The burden of adjustment typically falls only on nations in economic crisis. That should not be. 

Strong countries like Germany should increase spending to support the union's weaker 

economies, which would raise overall growth in the euro zone. But there is no mechanism to 

push Germany to pursue such a policy. Instead, the full burden of supporting euro zone growth 

falls on the European Central Bank, which is charged with meeting the euro zone inflation goal. 

The International Monetary Fund has urged Europe to form a true fiscal union -- with centralized 

revenue collection and spending decisions -- to ease the strains felt across the region. One start 

could be a basic social safety net covering all Europe. A new central entity would collect 

revenues and distribute funds to member states in need. Additional steps toward fiscal union 

could follow. 

This would help build public support for the tough economic changes that could, over time, 

generate stronger job creation across Europe. 

The IMF could continue to provide advice and counsel. But by remaining in negotiations with 

Greece, its officials are in an awkward -- if not untenable -- position. With Berlin signaling 

opposition to extending further debt relief, and Athens facing major debt repayments, the IMF 

will feel pressured to go along with another round of lending. 

All the parties are now struggling towards a compromise, somewhere between the IMF seeking 

immediate additional debt relief and Germany insisting debt relief be decided on later. Greece's 

Parliament, meanwhile, still needs to deliver more tax hikes, on top of pension cuts approved last 

week. 

The most likely outcome to the latest negotiations will be an economic reform package that fails 

to deliver either sufficient financing and debt relief or substantial structural reform. It would 
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likely leave Greece's economy mired in recession. Deep European vulnerabilities would remain 

exposed, signaling the likely high costs of sustaining Europe's economic viability. 

To avoid this, the International Monetary Fund might help far more if it let the euro zone 

countries face up to their responsibilities. They must finally work out their intcmal sharing of 

mutual financial support and common economic growth. 

The views expressed in this article are not those(){ Reuters News. 

http://www.rcuters.com/article/us-eurozone-imf~greece-commentary-idUSKCNOY80Gl 
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The IMF Should Get Out of Greece 

By Ashoka Mody 

Bloomberg View 

February 3, 2017 

The International Monetary Fund's involvement in Greece has been an unmitigated disaster: 

Time and again, its failure to heed crucial lessons has visited suffering upon the Greek 

people. When the fund's directors meet on Monday, they should agree to forgive the country's 

debts and get out. 

The IMF should never have gotten into Greece in the first place. As late as March 2010, with 

concerns about the Greek government's ability to pay its debts roiling markets, Europe's leaders 

wanted the IMF to stay away. Europeans feared that the fund's financial assistance to one of 

their own would signal broader weakness in the currency union. As Jean-Claude Juncker 

famouslv put it: "If California had a refinancing problem, the United States wouldn't go to the 

JMF." 

Nonetheless, German Chancellor Angela Merkel decided that the IMF's presence was the signal 

needed to persuade German citizens that Greece needed urgent financial support and that strict 

discipline in the use of those funds would be enforced. Merkel's political priorities coincided 

with the interests of Managing Director Dominique Strauss Kahn, who was desperate to pull the 

IMF out of irrelevance. From that moment on, the IMF became Europe's --mainly Germany's --

instrument in Greece. 

Then came the cardinal error: At the IMF's Board, over the fierce opposition of several executive 

directors, the Europeans and Americans pushed through a bailout program that, contrary to the 

fund's rules, did not impose losses on Greece's private creditors. The decision was based on a 

spurious claim that "restructuring" private debt would trigger a global financial meltdown. 

Thus, European governments and the TMF lent Greece a vast sum to repay its existing creditors. 

Greece's debt burden remained unchanged and onerous, and the most vulnerable Greeks were 

forced to accept crippling austerity to repay the country's new official creditors. The economy 

quickly and predictably went into a tailspin. 

Even when the IMF recognized the error of its ways, it didn't change course. An internal "strictly 

fOnfidential" report, later madf_l2\l_h!k, acknowledged that the program was riddled with 

"notable failures;' including the lack of private debt restructuring and excessive austerity. 

But the IMF never took responsibilitv. Instead, it demanded even more austerity throughout 

2014. In December, the public rebelled and brought the opposition Syriza party to power, which 

only made the IMF's demands more insistent. At this point, the evidence that the strategy was 

pushing Greece to economic and financial collapse was overwhelming. It was like requiring a 

trauma patient to run around the block before being admitted to intensive care. Y ct as usual, the 

inevitable suffering was blamed on Greece's unwillingness to cooperate. 
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The absurdity reached an apex in mid-2015, when the lMF released a report stating plainly that 

under Europe's latest set of austerity proposals, Greece would need a miracle to repay its debts. 

At the time, the IMF's own research showed that the best course would be to forgive the debt 

and abandon any further fiscal austerity. This would allow the country some freedom to grow 

again and possibly even attract new investment. And once that process was underway, Greece 

could be free of its official creditors and rely once again on private investors under notice that 

they were fully responsible for the risks they took. 

The IMF has since sought to move in the right direction, repeatedly calling on the Europeans to 

write down substantial amounts of debt. The Germans, however, have refused any meaningful 

forgiveness. Instead, they have followed a strategy of debt forgiveness in driblets because they 

astonishingly believe that German citizens will not be able do the sums and recognize that ever 

larger relief is being granted. 

And so the austerity has continued, suppressing growth and causing Greece's debt burden --

measured as a percentage of gross domestic product-- to increase. The IMF's latest analysis, in 

preparation for Monday's meeting, says that Greece's public debt levels could see an "explosive 

~-~' 

This strategy is utterly mindless. Greeks have been subjected to gratuitous pain. Those who can 

leave are doing so, threatening the prospect of a graying and desolate country. With every 

passing day, the chances that Europe's official creditors will see their money are dwindling. 

Investors have again pushed up yields on Greek bonds, fearing correctly that we are at yet 

another impasse. 

The agony won't end unless the IMF forces the issue. The IMF and its principal shareholders--

the Europeans and Americans-- made the original mistake and perpetuated the errors. A mere 

mea culpa is not enough: Real accountability requires the IMF's shareholders to honorably 

accept real losses. That means forgiving the country's debts to the fund and leaving the Greeks 

and Europeans to work out their own solution to this mess. If the IMF stays involved, it will 

succeed only in further shredding its credibility. 

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and 

its owners. 

https:/ /www. bloomberg.com/view/articles/20 1 7 -02-03/the-i mf-should-get -out -of-greece 
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Alexis Tsipras pushes for IMF to stay out of next Greek bailout 

By: Kerin Hope and Martin Wolf 

The Financial Times 

December 20, 2015 

Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras is pushing for the International Monetary Fund to stay out 

of the country's €86bn third bailout, leaving the eurozone to take full responsibility for 

overseeing economic refonns. 

Mr Tsipras said in an interview with the Financial Times he was "puzzled by the unconstructive 

attitude of the fund on fiscal and financial issues". He indicated that the IMF should leave his 

country's third bailout to the eurozone when it decides whether to stay involved early next year. 

··we think that after six years of managing in extraordinary crisis, Europe now has the 

institutional capacity to deal successfully with intra-European issues." 

Mr Tsipras's assertion is likely to anger the German government, which has always insisted the 

IMF stay on board. Berlin values the fund's technical expertise as much as it doubts the 

European Commission's resolve. 

Mr Tsipras also risks alienating the IMF, which is a strong advocate of debt relief for Athens 

while Germany and other eurozone members are strongly against debt writedowns, although he 

praised the fund's support on this issue. 

Mr Tsipras said his government wanted to implement bailout measures as swiftly as possible 

with the aim of recovering sovereignty and getting rid of the so-called "troika" of bailout 

monitors from the commission, IMF and European Central Bank. 

"We believe the sooner we get away from the [bailout] programme the better for our country," 

he said. "If Greece completes the first [progress] review in January, we'll be covering more than 

70 per cent of fiscal and financial measures in the agreement." 

Mr Tsipras also sounded confident that Greece would lift all remaining capital controls by March 

and resume borrowing on intemational capital markets "before the end of2016". 

The Syriza-led government struck a third rescue deal with creditors in July in an abrupt policy 

reversal aimed at averting a banking collapse and an involuntary "Grexif' from the euro. 

"We've been five years in a programme. It's hard for an EU country to have lost its sovereignty 

for such a long time. To regain it and to get out from the control of the troika, we have to 

implement the [bailout] agreement. It's hard but it's better than any other choice," Mr Tsipras 

said 

A successful recapitalisation last month of Greece's four biggest banks with participation by 

private investors has boosted hopes of a retum to economic growth in the second half of 2016. 
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The coalition earned praise from the creditors for winning parliamentary approval for a tough 

2016 budget and two separate packages of fiscal and structural reforms. Mr Tsipras 

acknowledged that a third package due to be approved in January included "one step that is 

difficult because it contains pension reform". 

Greece is resisting IMF demands for pension cuts, arguing that next year's target for reducing 

state pension funds' deficits can be achieved by restricting early retirement and finding 

alternative spending cuts. 

IMF officials are also sceptical of Greek revenue-raising forecasts for 2016. They are also 

concerned that this year's budget projection of zero growth may prove too optimistic given a 

bigger than expected fall in output in the third quarter. 

The IMF has suspended further lending to Greece because of concerns about the sustainability of 

the country's huge public debt, which is projected to reach more than 190 per cent of national 

output in 2016. 

With most eurozonc members ruling out reductions in the nominal face value of the debt owed to 

them by Greece, the solution will have to be found in other ways, such as a guarantee of 

continued low interest rates, delayed repayments, or some combination of the two. 

This prospective debt-service burden might, it is thought, discourage potential foreign and 

domestic investors, because they will be fearful of renewed fiscal difficulties once the debt 

service burden rises once again. 

"Our road map is to complete the first review as soon as possible and then to have a positive 

decision on necessary debt relief," the premier said. 

https://www.ft.com/content/05edcba6-a73e-ll e5-955c-l e I d6de94879?mhg5j=e2 
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6!2912017 Druckversion- Former Central Bank Head Karl Otto P6hl: Bailout Plan Is A!! About 'Rescuing Banks and Rich Greeks' - SPIEGEL ONLINE - lnte .. 

SPIEGEL ONLINE 05/18/2010 03:54PM 

Former Central Bank Head Karl Otto Pohl 

Bailout Plan Is All About 'Rescuing Banks and Rich Greeks' 

The 750 billion euro package the European Union passed last week to prop up the common 

currency has been heavily criticized in Germany. Former Bundesbank head Karl Otto Pohl told 

SPIEGEL that Greece may ultimately have to opt out, and that the foundation of the euro has 

been fundamentally weakened. 

SPIEGEL: Mr Piihl, are you still investing in the euro --or has the European common currency 

become too unstable of late? 

Pohl: I still have money in euros, but the question is justified. There is still danger that the euro will 

become a weak currency. 

SPIEGEl: The exchange rate with the dollar is still close to $1.25. What's the problem? 

Pohl: The foundation of the euro has fundamentally changed as a result of the decision by eurozone governments to transform themselves into a transfer union. That is a violation of every rule. 

In the treaties governing the functioning of the European Union, it explicitly states that no country 

is liable for the debts of any other. But what we are doing right now, is exactly that. Added to this 

is the fact that, against all its vows, and against an explicit ban within its own constitution, the 

European Central Bank (ECB) has become involved in financing states. Obviously, all of that will 

have an impact. 

SPIEGEL: What do you think will happen? 

Pi:ihl: The euro has already sunk in value against a whole list of other currencies. This trend could 

continue, because what we have basically done is guarantee a long line of weaker currencies that 

never should have been allowed to become part of the euro. 

SPIEGEL: The German government has said that there was no alternative to the rescue package for 

Greece, nor to that for other debt-laden countries. 

Pohl: I don't believe that. Of course there were alternatives. For instance, never having allowed 

Greece to become part of the euro zone in the first place. 

SPIEGEL: That may be true. But that was a mistake made years ago. 

Pohl: All the same, it was a mistake. That much is completely clear. I would also have expected the 

(European) Commission and the ECB to intervene far earlier. They must have realized that a small, 

indeed a tiny, country like Greece, one with no industrial base, would never be in a position to pay 

back €300 billion worth of debt. 

SPIEGEL: According to the rescue plan, it's actually €350 billion ... 

http://www.spiegel.de/in!emational/germany/former-central-bank-head-karl-otto-poeh!-bailout-plan-is·all-abouHescuing-banks-and-rfch-greeks·a-69524... 1/5 
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Piihl: ... which that country has even less chance of paying back. Without a "haircut," a partial 

debt waiver, it cannot and will not ever happen. So why not immediately? That would have been 

one alternative. The European Union should have declared half a year ago-- or even earlier that 

Greek debt needed restructuring. 

SPIEGEL: But according to Chancellor Angela Merkel, that would have led to a domino effect, with 

repercussions for other European states facing debt crises of their own. 

Piihl: I do not believe that. I think it was about something altogether different. 

SPIEGEl: Such as? 

Piihl: It was about protecting German banks, but especially the French banks, from debt write offs. 

On the day that the rescue package was agreed on, shares of French banks rose by up to 24 

percent. Looking at that, you can see what this was really about-- namely, rescuing the banks and 

the rich Greeks. 

SPIEGEL: In the current crisis situation, and with all the turbulence in the markets, has there really 

been any opportunity to share the costs of the rescue plan with creditors? 

Piihl: I believe so. They could have slashed the debts by one-third. The banks would then have had 

to write off a third of their securities. 

SPIEGEL: There was fear that investors would not have touched Greek government bonds for 

years, nor would they have touched the bonds of any other southern European countries. 

Pohl: I believe the opposite would have happened. Investors would quickly have seen that Greece 

could get a handle on its debt problems. And for that reason, trust would quickly have been 

restored. But that moment has passed. Now we have this mess. 

SPIEGEL: How is it possible that the foundation of the euro was abandoned, essentially overnight? 

Piihl: It did indeed happen with the stroke of a pen-- in the German parliament as well. Everyone 

was busy complaining about speculators and all of a sudden, anything seems possible. 

SPIEGEl: You don't believe in the oft-mentioned attacks allegedly perpetrated by currency 

gamblers, fortune hunters and speculators? 

Piihl: No. A lot of those involved are completely honorable institutes-- such as banks, but also 

insurance companies and investment- and pension funds --which are simply taking advantage of 

the situation. That's totally obvious. That's what the market is there for. 

SPIEGEL: You really think that pension funds should be gambling with high-risk debt securities? 

'Totally Normal Market Behavior' 

Pohl: No. They should be investing their investors' money as securely as possible. Should the credit 

rating of a debtor worsen because that debtor has been living beyond his means for years, then it 

is completely rational for these institutions to get rid of these bonds-- because they have become 

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insecure. Then other investors buy them at a lower price. They receive a higher return, but also 

have greater risk. That is totally normal market behavior. 

SPIEGEL: With the exception that speculators are now carrying no risk at all because eura-zone 

members have agreed to guarantee Greek debt. 

Pohl: Yes, and that is harmful. It means that the basic balancing mechanism in the market 

economy is out of sync. 

SPIEGEL: Is it possible that politicians invented the specter of rampant speculation to legitimize a 

break with the Lisbon Treaty and with the ECB's rules? 

Pohl: Of course that's possible. In fact, it's even plausible. 

SPIEGEL: What will be the political consequences of this crisis? 

Pohl: The whole mechanism of the European community will change. The EU is a federation of 

nations, not a federal republic. But now the European Commission will have a lot more power and 

more authority as well as the potential to interfere in national budget law. That, however, is 

constitutionally problematic in Germany. 

SPIEGEL: But this could also be construed as a positive development For a long time, critics have 

been saying that before we can have a genuine currency union we need common fiscal and 

economic policy. Surely this crisis has brought the EU closer to that goal. 

Pohl: Yes, that is the logical next step of our union, but we must bear the burden. You only have to 

look at what it is going to cost us Germans. I would have preferred that things hadn't gone quite 

this far. 

SPIEGEL: In the past, the bankers at the Bundesbank, Germany's central bank, were vehemently 

opposed to any political interference-- for example, when the government wanted to take control 

of gold stocks. At the moment even larger taboos are being broken-- yet there has been little 

outcry. Why is that? 

Pohl: The president of the Bundesbank, Axel Weber, is in a bind. He has been issuing warnings 

about these kinds of developments for some time and he continues to do so. But of course it is 

difficult to keep this up in the face of a political majority. 

SPIEGEL: Especially when he aspires to the presidency of the ECB and is therefore dependent on 

political goodwill. 

Pohl: That may also play a role. 

SPIEGEL: In the run up to the currency union that was formed when Germany was reunified in 

1990, it was said that, if something is economically ill-advised, it is also a political mistake. Does 

the rescue package for teetering euro-zone countries make sense? 

Pohl: It depends an what one wants to achieve. If the point was merely to calm the markets 

temporarily, then yes. But that can't be the only reason. 

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SPIEGEl: Because the side effects will be too large, you mean? 

Pohl: Absolutely. Just imagine if claims were made. Germany would have to pay countless billions, 

which is dreadful. And, it could lead to the euro becoming a weak currency. 

SPIEGEL: If you were president of the Bundesbank today, would you be ordering the printing of 

German marks just in case they became necessary? 

Pohl: No, no, we have not gone that far quite yet. In my opinion, the euro is in no danger. Perhaps 

one of the smaller countries will have to leave the currency union. 

SPIEGEL: How should that work? 

Pohl: It would involve Greece, if we stick with the case we were discussing, reintroducing the 

drachma. 

SPIEGEL: But Greece doesn't seem to have any interest in doing that-- and it would be against 

European agreements to force Athens to leave the currency union. 

Pohl: That is correct. As long as a country receives such massive support, it would, of course, have 

no interest in turning its back on the euro. 

SPIEGEL: You think that could change? 

Pohl: On the mid and long term, I wouldn't rule it out. 

Interview conducted by Wolfgang Reuter 

URl: 

http:/ /www.spiegel.de/international/germany/former-central-bank-head-karl-otto-poehl-bailoutplan-is-all-about-rescuing-banks-and-rich-greeks-a-695245.html 

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© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2010 

All Rights Reserved 

Reproduction only allowed with the permission of SPIEGELnet GmbH 

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