Agnes Lovasz and Paul Tugwell write:  Greece will continue with efforts to privatize the country’s largest port and regional airports as it seeks ways to attract investment for other state assets, Economy Minister George Stathakis said, in a government concession in talks with its creditors.

A sale of the Piraeus Port would be a reversal on the part of Greece’s Syriza party-led government, which had earlier pledged to block such moves. As part of ongoing negotiations to unlock aid to Europe’s most-indebted nation, Greek’s European creditors have asked for more specific policy proposals in areas including labor market deregulation, a pension-system overhaul, sales tax reform and privatization of state-held assets. Still, Stathakis said the government doesn’t plan to sell other assets at the moment.

The Piraeus Port sale “is part of the bailout negotiations,” and the fact that the government “agrees to privatize the port is a compromise to creditors,” government spokesman Gabriel Sakellaridis told reporters in Athens today.

A venture led by Fraport AG won the right in November 2014 to use, operate and manage the 14 regional airports after it offered 1.2 billion euros ($1.4 billion) for 40 years and promised to pay an annual, guaranteed leasing fee of 22.9 million euros. Fraport also pledged to make 330 million euros in investments over the next four years. Greece is talking to Fraport and a decision should be reached “very soon.”

It’s “definite” that Greece won’t proceed with selling other state assets on a list that had been agreed on by the previous government such as water companies, the post office or Public Power Corp, Stathakis said. “We’re trying to work on a different model than privatizing to attract capital and investment such as for the country’s railways and other ports” and Greece is looking at “alternative options to 100 percent privatization.”

The sale of land at Hellenikon, site of Athens’s old airport that is Europe’s largest unused tract of urban real estate, “is an issue under discussion,” Stathakis said.

Greece’s most indebted state is locked in talks with its creditors over the terms attached to its 240 billion-euro bailout. Uncertainty over the country’s future in the euro area has triggered a liquidity squeeze, which pulled the economy back into a double-dip recession.

Stathakis said. “The gap between Greece and its creditors has been closed on most issues and while there are some areas of concern to do with the pension system and reform of value-added taxes, there are ways to bridge this difference and come to an agreement.”

Negotiations between Greece and its creditors have put finance ministers and policy makers at a loss for words, but they’ve found a go-to crutch to fill the awkward silences — “taking stock,” a rhetorical place-holder that takes up air time but doesn’t mean much. Sort of like the actual progress in the negotiations thus far.

A few days ago, Dutch Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem made his way to the podium in European Council’s Justus Lipsius building to a closed-door meeting of eurozone finance ministers for waiting reporters: “After our stock taking on Greece, we had a broad discussion on euroarea economic issues,” he said.

The same words came again a few minutes later.  “We really need to have an agreement on what has to be done to complete this program,” Dijsselbloem said, “Then we can take stock on what the fiscal indicators, macroeconomic indicators, what will they do.” He was talking about whether or not Greece would have a third rescue program beyond its first and second bailouts worth a combined !245 billion, the last !7.2 billion of which has been under negotiation for months.

How many times can stock be taken without anyone being able to explain precisely the inventory of the talks? In Brussels, there’s no limit and seemingly no one who is prepared to take stock of how much longer to keep taking stock.

In late April, before an informal gathering of finance ministers in Latvia, European Commission chief spokesman Margaritis Schinas, a Greek himself, said, “This meeting in Riga will be the next opportunity for minsters to take stock.” When European Commissioner    described the subsequent    session in which Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis was berated for his country’s lack of progress, he said simply, “We took stock of the situation.”

Just last week at the European Business summit, Moscovici was on a panel with Varoufakis. When it was his turn to speak, Moscovici said, “Yanis is brilliant in the European language. Of course we are closer. We learn to talk. I think we have a common language.” Then the former French finance minister couldn’t help himself: “I really hope there will be progress on which we can take stock.”

On the Rocky Road to Globalism:

Alex Bolton: “Senate leaders have reached a deal to revive President Obama’s trade agenda, which stalled Tuesday after Democrats filibustered it. Under the agreement, senators will vote on two controversial bills favored by Democrats before moving to a wide-open debate on granting Obama fast-track authority to negotiate future trade deals. It comes a day after an embarrassing defeat for the White House that highlighted tensions between the president and liberal Democrats led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). Republicans said Democrats shifted their stance after getting pummeled in the media.”

Pierpaolo Barbieriic, economic historian is the author of a new book looking at Adolf Hitler’s role in the Spanish Civil War says lessons learned from that period in history could provides valuable insights for modern day Europe, specifically how economics trump politics and ideology when it comes to policymaking.

“There have been over ten thousand books written on the Spanish Civil War, but it was clear when I started this project that Franco wanted to forget afterward how much he had depended on Hitler and Mussolini,” says Pierpaolo Barbieri, author of the book Hitler’s Shadow Empire: The Nazis and the Spanish Civil War. “I argue that the Nazis paid for this and intervened in Spain in such a decisive manner not because of ideology but because of economics.”

“Things that look political have other motivations,” he said. Eventually, Hitler became an ideologically driven madman. But his early intervention in Spain showed a more pragmatic and economically calculated style of leadership, he said.

“At the end of the day it was Hitler’s choice and he went with the racial empire over the economic empire, but it wasn’t always so,” Barbieri said.

Barbieri, executive director of Greenmantle, a macroeconomic and geopolitical consultancy, says it’s also economics in large part which has caused turmoil in contemporary Spain. “The youth of Spain has a right to be angry. But the path forward doesn’t mean doing away with everything,” he says.

“I think Podemos isn’t the answer,” Barbieri said of Spain’s new left-wing political party formed last year. “They are a bunch of new guys with a lot of old ideas inspired by the governments in Venezuela and Argentina.”

The way forward, he says, is renewal, not upheaval. Sound policies in the 1970s and 1980s that led Spain to growth and European integration. That should be the guide.

“I believe a more plural and integrated Europe will emerge from this crisis. Now we see Spain recovering very fast; in March Spain created more jobs than the United States.”

The Argentine-born author says his next project will consist of looking at why Latin America has not become more integrated in spite of having “broadly the same levels of development, close cultural ties and histories.”

“We should be one economic unit, we can aim towards emulating the best part of the european integration project. Together we are stronger than divided,” he said.

Anjli Raval in Riyadh writes:  Saudi Arabia says its strategy of squeezing high-cost rivals such as US shale producers is succeeding, as the world’s largest crude exporter seeks to reassert itself as the dominant force in the global oil market.

The International Energy Agency has released data backing up the Saudi position. The agency said that with the number of rigs running in the US plunging by 60 per cent in response to lower oil prices, US shale oil production had “buckled” in April, “bringing a multiyear winning streak to an apparent close”.

But the IEA also cautioned that it would be “premature” to suggest that Opec had “won the battle for market share”. It said global crude supply was growing, even from high-cost areas such as Brazil, as well as from other Opec member states such as Iran and Iraq.
However, the Saudi official said he expected the kingdom to maintain its dominance of global energy, despite the growth of alternatives to fossil fuels and competition from rival oil producers within Opec and beyond. “Saudi Arabia wants to extend the age of oil,” he said. “We want oil to continue to be used as a major source of energy and we want to be the major producer of that energy.”
Saudi officials explained that the policy was designed to put pressure on producers that require a higher oil price to be economic such as US shale drillers and companies operating in Brazil’s offshore fields. These they believed would be the first to collapse in a survival of the fittest as prices plunged.

Expectations are already rising that the market could start to tighten.

US shale producers would also disagree that Saudi Arabia has succeeded in squeezing them. The US oil industry has slowed down.

The Saudi official admitted “increased efficiencies” were likely as US shale and other producers adjusted to lower prices. He also said the impact of the price rebound was still “unknown” and “there is not yet any clarity on the US supply curve and drivers”.