International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde, who is in Sydney ahead of the G20 meetings this weekend, responding to a question on the ABC’s Q&A program last night as to how the IMF will avoid in the future the mistakes and the pain that measures for Greece inflicted to the country, acknowledged that the real initial miscalculations were the ones that led to the wrong approach in Greece. She also went on to state that Greece, as a result of its effort, is coming out now with its first primary surplus since 1943.
Christine Lagarde said that the way to deal with a crisis such as the one in Greece is to restore a bit of sanity in the public finances, to document everything and “To make sure that at some [point] the Greek economy could return to financing itself and to standing on its own merits and its own strength rather than be on life support. So that was the whole purpose of the various programs we put in place between the European partners of Greece, the IMF and Greece,” she claimed.
She also went on to state that “We have done everything that we could to make sure that the burden would be fairly born by all and not just by the employees and the civil servants, we made sure that there will be enough of a safety net to that people who were most exposed will not suffer too much.”
