Self-fulfilling Prophecy

There are hedges that may bring about that against which they seek to guard their drafters.

Among these, one has to count this.  

The European Investment Bank, which is making loans to various Greek businesses (in order to fulfill a commitment to issue a total of 600 million euros of such loans by January 2013, and 1.4 billion euros by the end of 2015) has taken to including clauses that account for the possibility that Greece will resume use of the drachma.

As I mentioned in mid February of this year, the EIB is one party in a “troika” of institutions bargaining on behalf of the central Eurozone countries with the countries of the zone’s more troubled periphery. The EU itself and the IMF are the other members of said troika.

The key coming date is May 6. That is Election Day in Greece, and polls indicate that the coalition of political parties inclined to pursue the country’s dealings with the troika [roughly speaking, a center-right party and a center-left party] are in position to win a one vote majority in the next parliament. But this leaves open the intriguing question: what if anything will the electorate make of drachma clauses? Don’t they rather dent the we’re-all-in-this-together mood you’d want to foster if you wanted to save the unity of the Eurozone? Don’t they suggest that the troika and the nations by whom it is dominated are looking out for themselves and Greece ought to do so as well?

I suspect the governing coalition may not get that one-vote majority on which it is counting, and will not survive this election as a governing coalition.