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Wednesday 25 February 2015

Less than zero

You have probably never heard of Declan Costello. Elvis Costello (aka Declan McManus) maybe, but not Declan Costello. Apparently he is a pretty smart guy.

Declan Costello was born in Galway, Ireland in 1967. He has a Degree in Economics from Trinity College Dublin and a Masters Degree from the College of Europe in Bruges. He joined the European Commission in 1991 and has worked in DG ECFIN (barring a 9 month secondment to the Portuguese Ministry of Finance) as an economist up until 2012. More about him in a bit.

You may have noticed that the Greeks managed to get their budget reform proposals in by the midnight deadline. Midnight Hawaii time that was.  First Eurofudge, but the EU managed to read and consider the proposals remarkably quickly before announcing that they constituted a valid starting point for discussions.

Kudos, one would think to the new Greek government, who armed with their meaningless (for these purposes) democratic mandate hadn't managed to negotiate any concessions out of the Troika, but had at least been permitted to submit their own proposals rather than taking a diktat from Brussels.

And an impressive list of reforms they are too.  Not so much in the content, but in the form of the drafting, displaying a remarkably dexterous use of the English language and financial terminology. You can download a copy from here.

But if you do download it and read it in Adobe reader, be sure to click on File/Properties and look at the author.

My Aim is True.


2 comments:

Demetrius said...

Ooyer. Go to top of the class with a Gold Merit Point. Is this Costello one of the Costello's I ask?

Demetrius said...
This comment has been removed by the author.