Megan E Greene, Columnist

Greece May Get Cruel Reward for Its Success

February 17, 2013 at 11:30 PM UTC

She has been appointed as an external member of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee. She will take up her new duties on July 5, 2023. Currently, she is Global Chief Economist for the Kroll Institute, where she advises on the potential impact of global macroeconomic developments and policy on the firm’s business services and those of its clients. She serves as a Senior Fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University and also teaches at Schwarzman College (Tsinghua University) and the European University Institute. She is also the first Dame DeAnne Julius Senior Fellow in International Economics at Chatham House. She serves on the Academic Advisory Committee at the San Francisco Federal Reserve and writes a regular column on global macroeconomics for The Financial Times. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Political Economy from Princeton University and a Master of Science in International Relations from the University of Oxford. Previously, she was a Senior Fellow at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at Harvard Kennedy School and Global Chief Economist at John Hancock/Manulife Asset Management.

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Greece reported recently that it has reached a primary budget surplus, the Holy Grail of austerity, meaning that once you exclude interest payments on the country’s massive debts, the government is finally taking in more revenue than it spends.

This news should be worthy of a ticker-tape parade, after three years of Draconian retrenchment and a partial writedown of privately held Greek debt. Cruelly, however, the main beneficiary of a return to primary surplus may not be Prime Minister Antonis Samaras and his pro-bailout government, but the main opposition Syriza party, which is pushing for the country to refuse further austerity measures and declare a moratorium on its debt payments.