Since these exhortations continue, however, one assumes they must be having some beneficial effect on local production. Likewise, in the U.S., when a president is seen drinking tea on television, the consumption, and consequently the price, of coffee immediately plummets whereupon Brazil can’t pay back the rising interest rates on its U.S. bank-based loans. Such is the power of suggestion on the public, and the brilliance of economic and advertising policy, in the so-called developed countries.
Now, in the looking-glass land of Greece, where everything is turned around, the crafty citizen isn’t going to buy this kind of nonsense. When something is officially promoted in the media, people do just the opposite. So, the only way to stimulate the local purchase of local products, is to devalue the currency and thus bring up the price of imported goods. It doesn’t take Milord Keynes to figure that one out, although it may put a number of agricultural noses out of joint in other Common Market countries.
In similar fairytale fashion, when the government here says, and emphatically repeats, that it is not going to do a certain thing, one can be fairly sure that this is just exactly what it is going to do. So, when spokesmen of the present government in early January affirmed, and then reaffirmed, that the drachma would not be devalued until doomsday, for the politically alert, the cat was out of the bag. And so it fell out: on January 10, the drachma sloughed off 15.5% of its rather soft fur against other currencies.
Not that some weren’t caught off guard. Indeed, certain people, on the following morning, slipping out from between their Fieldcrest sheets and into their Badedas baths, and donning themselves in their Lacoste shirts, Macgregor pullovers, Ferragamo shoes, Lee Cooper trousers and Hermes neckties and sitting down to their breakfasts of German orange juice, Danish bacon, Dutch butter and Finnish rye-crisps, opened up their papers of Swedish newsprint, and exclaimed with horror, ‘How in the world did this ever happen?’
Whereupon these outraged citizens jumped into their Saville Row coats and Ninth Avenue minks, leapt into their BMW’s and Hondas and dashed to the supermarkets where lordly Camembert was still underselling lowly Kasseri. And they heaped up their shopping trolleys with foreign delicacies as the thud-thud-thud of the handstamper changing all the prices in the markets was growing louder and nearer. For the politically alert, however, all this rushing about was rather crass, since they had already completed their business affairs with foreign banks several days earlier.
In the jungle of nations where the USSR is the lumbering bear, the U.S. the screaming eagle and the U.K. the yawning lion, Greece may be the Yorkshire terrier — small, noisy, aggressive and clever, — but, as Darwin pointed out, it’s not the size, it’s the ability to adapt that accounts for survival of species, and there are no flies on Greece on this score. No matter how many wheels of Stilton rolled off the shelves of Athenian markets on January 11, they can’t last forever. So it’s back to feta and Kasseri, olives and tomatoes, yoghurt and Loutraki water. Of course, all these good things now at lower cost abroad, will also be consumed in great quantities throughout Common Market countries. If there were any justice on earth, Greece would now be awarded a medal by the World Health Organization.
Pampered Statistics
The socialist ideals which so many voted for in 1981 cannot of course, be achieved in a day. A reason for this is that reality has a way of intruding between the aims and the goals, and often dragging its feet in such a way that things may start out in a direction quite opposite to the one intended.
Last month’s devaluation was meant to stimulate exports at more competitive prices. Yet the export of lemons, by example, in the first 19 days of 1983 dropped by 90% in comparison to the same period in 1982, from 48,000 to 5,000 tons. The startling velocity of this drop, comparable, one might say, to the fall of a lemon from branch to ground, is said to be due to marketing, which used to be in the hands of professional export houses but is now in those of agricultural cooperatives which lack experience and expertise in promotion. Economists complain that the government is just sitting back and watching an interesting socialist experiment. But this seems illogical, since lemons — as well as olives and oranges, which are suffering similar problems — are largely exported to Eastern bloc countries whose governments would, one might suppose, cock a favorable eye towards interesting socialist experiments.
Another goal of government was that, following devaluation, there would be a minimal rise in prices, no profiteering and no hoarding. Of course, it could only be expected that services, depending on imports such as energy, would have to raise their rates. So, on January 20, when it was announced that electricity costs would rise by 12%, air travel by 30%, train travel by 20% and municipal public transport by 100%, all of these things could only be called par for a course which is admittedly tricky and full of obstacles.
In respect to profiteering and hoarding, however, reality veered off quite sharply from official intentions. The Ministry of Commerce has a department which serves to protect and inform the consumer. In the eleven days following devaluation, this department received 2,000 telephone calls; of these, 659 were registered, and the others referred to more relevant government agencies. Of those registered, 579 calls complained of price increases. Broken down by category, statistics tell all: evaporated milk (245 calls); domestic food and drink such as cheese, yoghurt, chocolate (71 calls); electrical appliances (36 calls); imported food and drink such as butter and whiskey (33 calls); automobiles and spare parts (24 calls); and a scattering of enquiries about plastics, steel products, liquid gas bottles and paints. Notably numerous among complaints in regards to hoarding or refusal to sell, referred to Pampers and whiskey.
When these interesting figures have been fed back to us from the computers, no doubt we will learn a great deal about modern Greek society. But one thing is already clear from the evaporated milk and Pampers figures. Greeks may be fickle about their governments, but they certainly love their children.
