Black Humor for a Eurozone Black Friday

In rejecting the Brussels Austerity 3.0 Agreement, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras surprised everyone last Friday with his call for a July 5 referendum, including myself, who had expected his government to resign if he didn’t choose the poisoned Chamberlain chalice. Is this a brilliant “Flucht nach vorne” (take your pick of “taking the bull by the horns” or “reckless headlong flight”)? Or just the final quixotic round of the game of turkey Greece has been playing with the Eurozone (which needed until Sunday to catch up by issuing a text of their last confidential proposal)?

For, as was to be expected, by Saturday the Eurogroup had turned down Tsipras’s request for an extension of the second bailout program until after the referendum, instead letting it expire on June 30, the date Greece also needs to transfer some €1.6 billion to the IMF, money it has admitted it does not have (no more miracles of the fish and loaves). And on Sunday the ECB, while not terminating its ELA support to Greek banks, did not raise the previous limit, meaning that there will be no additional funding to meet the onslaught of angry customers this week (reportedly, even Greek ministers were desperately withdrawing money from ATMs during the parliamentary vote on the referendum on Saturday). Thus it is not even clear what the Greek people would be voting on July 5 should the referendum still take place, since the Eurogroup offer seems to be already off the table, and their country will have already fallen off a cliff of default and financial collapse by then.

So the Greek tragedy is taking its easy to anticipate course: bank holidays and capital controls, something the Syriza government should have been preparing for for months, if they ever had a Plan B (something which, as part of their public game of chicken, they always denied, and now I really am beginning to think was actually the case).

Faced with an outcome one has been predicting for months (e.g., April Fool’s post, biblical prophecy), does one indulge in Schadenfreude? I think that would be disrespectful and self-indulgent in the face of this very real tragedy for the Greek people. Despair? Whom does that help? The only thing that remains seems to be black humor.

So here is a sampling of recent quotes that I think can only be appreciated as a sublime form of black humor in the face of the unpalatable and inexorable march of history:

Saturday, June 27

[Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis] declined to say how he thought the European Central Bank should respond to the dire situation facing Greece's banks which saw heavy withdrawals on Saturday on top of the billions that have flowed out in recent weeks, but he said the banks should remain open.

"This smooth transition will require that everybody does their job properly, and that includes the central bank, to keep the banks open and to keep the monetary system functioning as it should," he said [New York Times/Reuters].

The very next day the Greek government closed the banks and imposed capital controls.

Saturday, June 27

When representatives of the three creditor institutions - euro zone governments, the ECB and IMF - met after Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis had left, participants quoted one senior official as joking that at least they could refer again to the lenders as the "Troika"… [Reuters].

FT (Alphaville blog?), in a recent article I can no longer locate, identified that “senior official” as ECB President Mario Draghi, who as always will have the last word on matters Eurozone. I must admit that, whatever else you can say about this debacle, you have to admire his dry wit and sangfroid.

Sunday, June 28

“I just can’t believe these guys are willing to torch their own country,” one investor with a large holding of Greek bonds lamented in an email. “They thought this was a game. Now, when the supermarkets run out of food, gas stations run out of gas, hospitals have no medicine, tourists flee, salaries don’t get paid because banks shut — what are they going to do?” [New York Times].

Now off to the movies at the Bologna Cinema Ritrovato film festival for some light comic relief and cinematic time-travel.

It's an ill wind that blows nobody any good: Grexit and Sant’Anna di Stazzema (Sketches in European Solidarity III)

 

The memorial plaque at the Sant’Anna di Stazzema National Peace Park bearing the names of the 560 victims of the August 12, 1944 massacre perpetrated by the Waffen-SS, was destroyed by a windstorm on March 5 of this year. I visited the site on May 21 with my colleague Alessandro Nuvolari (right) during my annual teaching stint at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa. The self-destruction of the plaque is hauntingly symbolic of the current contradictions of the European project.

 

Rivers of (real and virtual) ink are now being spilled on the denouement of the seemingly never-ending Greek debt crisis, but one thing you can’t help but give both the creditors and the debtors nations credit for—they have succeeded in providing continuing high drama and suspense right down to the wire, something not otherwise characteristic of the staid European Union, whose official goals until now have been peace, stability, and mutual prosperity and understanding. I don’t think Europe has experienced such a sustained buildup of public diplomatic brinkmanship since the ill-fated Munich Agreement negotiations of September, 1938 that led to the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia (see Jean-Paul Sartre's The Reprieve—French original title Le Sursis—for a breathless rendition of this earlier media-age cliffhanger). But of course I do not mean to insinuate that there is any analogy between the actors and issues then and now, even if some might argue (such as Wolfgang Münchau in the FT and Spiegel Online) that, with the credibility of the currency union hanging in the balance, almost as much is ultimately at stake.

And I also do not want to reiterate here the many arguments pro and contra on the various positions and conspiracy theories now circulating (see Project Syndicate’s or VoxEU.org for research economists’ views, for example), except to say that regardless of the outcome (Grexit/Graccident/capitulation to a temporizing compromise/collapse of the Greek government), there will be no winners, and only serious losses of credibility and capital for the Eurozone, possibly not stopping at its unraveling. The proverb “it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good” actually suggests that there can be winds so pernicious that there is no redeeming value to anyone, and that certainly seems to be the case in the Greek debt crisis. Another temporizing compromise will not lead to a revival of Greek economic activity precisely because, aside from continuing austerity, it will not remove the inhibiting threat of Grexit currency and default risk for more than a few months. And while a properly managed Grexit implying devaluation and default, after initial sharp turmoil, might allow Greece to regain monetary and fiscal sovereignty and a growth perspective, the creditor losses will vastly exceed those an appropriate debt restructuring would have entailed (in 2010, 2012, or even now), and reopen the Pandora’s Box of illiquidity risk, spread explosion, and further Euro exits that Mario Draghi seemed to have magically banished in 2012 with OMT. And even if the remaining Eurozone countries circle the wagons around the German austerity project and impose punitive measure against Greece as a warning to anti-austerity populists at the gate in Spain, Ireland, France or Italy, the European idea will have been discredited as a humanitarian project.

For that humanitarian project was initiated precisely to transcend forever the depths of depravity the massacre at Sant’Anna di Stazzema showed European were capable of towards each other a mere 70 years ago. On Aug. 12, 1944, a troop of Waffen-SS, ostensibly searching for Italian partisans, systematically massacred 560 civilians in the village, although it was located outside of the zone of active hostilities and was crowded with refugees. Spike Lee’s underrated 2008 film Miracle at St. Anna combines these historical events with the battlefield plight of an Afro-American platoon of the segregated 92nd ‘Buffalo’ Infantry Division. Filmed on location, the plot, based on the novel of the same name by James McBride, takes some historical liberties by introducing a fictional Judas-like partisan traitor, provoking controversy in Italian during its first screening there, but is otherwise remarkably faithful to the known facts.

The village church at Sant’Anna di Stazzema today, principal site of the massacre and its reenactment in Spike Lee’s film. Billy Budd, senior military adviser to the film: “When we shot the massacre scene at Sant’Anna di Stazzema, on the very ground where this atrocity occurred - I’ll tell you, there was not a dry eye in the house at the end of that day.”

The summer of 1944 saw a number of such massacres in German-occupied Europe committed mainly by Waffen-SS units, such as Oradour-sur-Glane in France and Distomo in Greece. While these units invoked retribution for partisan attacks as their justification, it was soon clear to the Wehrmacht command, even in the Draconian context of Nazi military logic which exacted ten executed civilians for every German soldier killed, that this was only a pretext and that the respective commanders had exceeded their authority. None, however, were brought to justice or even reprimanded by the German command (although there were investigations), and remarkably, few have been brought to justice since by the postwar European democracies.  Quite aside from the morality, one wonders why these Waffen-SS units, ideologically fanaticized as they were, even went to the trouble of gratuitously massacring civilians outside the immediate theater of war (in the case of Oradour-sur-Glane, the time lost to the massacre meant the unit arrived at the Normandy front, its actual objective, too late to matter). Yet there is an obvious pattern here, spread out over occupied Europe, that screams for a military-psychological explanation.

The Italian authorities only initiated judicial proceedings in 2004 after the “armadio della vergogna” (“cabinet of shame”) was accidentally discovered in 1994 in the military prosecutor’s office in Rome. It contained evidence about war crimes during World War II that had been hidden away in the interests of the state (primarily not to impede Germany’s entrance into NATO during the cold war and provoke prosecutions of similar Italian war crimes during the Balkan occupation). In 2005 an Italian military court in La Spezia finally found ten Waffen-SS officers guilty of war crimes during the Sant’Anna di Stazzema massacre and sentenced them in absentia to life imprisonment, but German courts in 2010 refused to extradite them to Italy. In the absence of judicial solidarity, German President Gauck stepped into the breech during a 2013 ceremony at the Peace Park.

German and Italian Presidents Gauck and Napolitano displaying European solidarity at a 2013 commemorative service at the Sant’Anna di Stazzema memorial where courts feared to tread. (Picture credit: DW)

The museum at Sant’Anna di Stazzema, besides a very thorough exhibition on the historical background, also shows a number of documentary films, including a recent one based on interviews with survivors of the massacre, who were all children at the time who had managed to hide or flee. One group of survivors recounts in this film that they were taken away from the village to be executed by a group of SS soldiers but after all but one of them were called back to the village, the lone remaining soldier fired his machine gun into the woods and told them to flee. What’s remarkable about this incident is that, despite all the fanatization and combat brutalization, once released from peer pressure and control, even Waffen-SS soldiers were able to display humanity at risk to themselves.

But now back to Greece.  Joseph Stiglitz reminds us in a June 5th article that

The future of Europe and the euro now depends on whether the eurozone’s political leaders can combine a modicum of economic understanding with a visionary sense of, and concern for, European solidarity. We are likely to begin finding out the answer to that existential question in the next few weeks.

That time has come this week, but the prospects are not encouraging. Gideon Rachman argued in the Financial Times two days ago that the three main alternative solutions to the Greek debt crisis may all lead to chaos:

But the truth is that all three routes may ultimately lead to the same destination: the destruction of the European single currency. The lengths of the journeys would vary, the scenery along the way would look different but the end point could still be the same.

My guess is that, at least by the weekend, we will be confronted with only one of two immediate outcomes:

 

Will Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras return to Athens this week with a Brussels Agreement containing “austerity* for our time” lasting as long as British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 Munich Agreement’s “peace for our time”? (Picture credits left: GLM; right: Wikimedia Commons).

[* Due to Tsipras’s Greek accent, it may not be clear if he says “austerity” or ‘'prosperity.”]

Or will his coalition government simply collapse for lack of any agreement, or lack of parliamentary support for whatever agreement he does bring back?

In any event, it will represent an existential failure of European solidarity for which the destruction by ill winds of the Sant’Anna di Stazzema memorial plaque is a fitting symbol.

PS: Italian Minister Maria Elena Boschi has informed Alessandro Nuvolari in a June 19th email that the rubble of the memorial plaque has now been removed, and that she expects it to be replaced by a new one in time for the forthcoming 71st anniversary of the August 12 massacre.

Eurozone Mixed Metaphor Barnyard Merry-go-round

“The cow has been skating on thin ice for too long,” Mr Juncker said ahead of his meeting with Mr Tsipras. “We have to take the cow off the ice.”

reported today in the Financial Times

 

Have we now progressed in the Greek debt crisis from a game of chicken, via a game of turkey, to a cow skating on thin ice?

   

 

What’s next? Closing the stable door after the horse has bolted?

The Miracle of the Fish and Loaves: Greece Meets May 12 IMF Payment!

The Miracle of May 12: Greece manages to make €757 million IMF payment (fish: right) while continuing to pay domestic salaries and pensions (loaves: left). Informed observers attribute it to the Salvation of Salonika. But for how much longer can the multitudes be fed?

 

The Greek game of turkey continues to astonish us. The Greek government authorized the transfer this morning of the €757 million it owes to the IMF, thus avoiding default, producing a Miracle of May 12 and continuing to defy worldwide expectations (including our own).

How, and especially, why, is it doing it? First, there is the Salvation of Salonika, where the mayor of Greece’s second largest city, Thessaloniki, alone among major Greece municipalities, transferred the city’s cash reserves to the Greek Central Bank:

Thessaloniki Mayor Yiannis Boutaris believes that the government’s behavior is “completely crazy” but he has nevertheless led the way among peers in transferring his municipality’s cash reserves to the Bank of Greece, where the government can use them for short-term borrowing.

“It is very important that we show this municipality understands what will happen to the country,” Boutaris told the municipal council on Tuesday ahead of a vote on the matter. “We are not doing the government a favor; we are supporting the country.”

However, Boutaris admitted that he does not see eye to eye with the coalition on the way it has handled negotiations with the institutions. “The government does not speak the same language as those it is negotiating with,” he told Kathimerini. “That is why they cannot understand each other.”

[ekathimerini.com , Tuesday May 5, 2015 (21:07)]

Second, in its obsession with providing “the institutions” (aka troika) with no pretext for throwing it out of the Eurozone as part of its larger game-of-turkey strategy, it apparently has been indulging in its own variety of turbo-austerity—temporarily boosting its fiscal surplus by delaying payments to suppliers and investment projects (see Peter Spiegel at FT.com and the Greek budget analysis by Silvia Merler at breugel).

Greek Finance Minister and media superstar Yanis Varoufakis, rebounding from his recent sidelining, reiterates that Greece, despite its financial difficulties, will not cross “red lines” regarding pension cuts and reforms to collective bargaining. Nevertheless, he freely admits that Greece is facing a liquidity crisis within “a couple of weeks.”

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, for his part, has made a surprising counter in his game-of-turkey hand by now allowing for a Greek referendum to decide whether the country will remain in the Eurozone and accept further austerity and painful “structural reforms.” Recall that an attempt by then Prime Minister Papandreou in 2011 to hold a similar referendum was immediately torpedoed by explicit threats of French President Sarkozy and German Chancellor Merkel to summarily expel Greece from the Eurozone, and soon brought down his government. Peter Schwarz on the World Socialist Website characterized this incident as follows:

The way Papandreou was forced to retreat—and possibly to resign—has all the hallmarks of a political coup. It demonstrates that the austerity measures implemented by the European Union to save the euro and the banks are incompatible with democratic principles.

That Schäuble now displays such a conciliatory attitude to a Greek referendum may be indicative of just how far the Germans have come in their game of turkey. That is, they now want Greece out, but, like all other participants in this game, don’t want to have any egg left on their face afterwards. This is something for the Greek people themselves, since their government has been skillfully playing its hand in this game of turkey as a war of attrition by making Herculean efforts to avoid default while not betraying its electoral mandate.

But on a more personal level, Schäuble took pains to defend his much maligned Greek counterpart in a recent interview in the Frankfurter Allgemeine (my translation):

We are both finance ministers and bear responsibility, and thus we work well together. The media first built Varoufakis up into a superstar and now they have been dressing him down. Each is as misplaced as the other.

Update 17:35 CET: Unfortunately, Max Weber’s Entzauberung der Welt (disenchantment of the world) once again seems to be triumphant in our enlightened age, relegating the Salvation of Salonika to the rubbish heap of religious myths. The Financial Times reports at 14:41 CET that Greece actually plundered its emergency account at the IMF (apparently with the latter’s connivance) to the tune of €650 million to meet today’s Miracle of May 12 repayment. According to the FT, “Without the additional cash the government would not have been able to repay the loan instalment and also disburse nearly €1bn on Wednesday to pay public sector salaries, another official said.”

Is there no solace left for the spiritually inclined in our disenchanted meltdown creation?

Of course this can only mean that the prophesized “Grexit, Graccident, Grone” moment looms even nearer when Greek salaries and pensions—the miracle of the loaves—also comes under threat of disenchantment before the end of the month. Or can there still be a Eurogroup epiphany?

The Welfare State Perpetuum Mobile: Is Greece Reinventing the Clientelist Wheel (aka the Circular Flow)?

   

Left: Perpetuum Mobile of Villard de Honnecourt (about 1230). Right: Boyle’s self-flowing flask (18th century). Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Yesterday’s Financial Times brings us more astonishing updates on Greece’s game of musical turkey: “Greece overturns civil service reforms.” One of the notorious “structural reforms” that all previous governments had agreed upon with the hated “troika” was to slim down Greece’s notoriously overstaffed and highly inefficient state bureaucracy (a bureaucracy which, like Italy’s, may actually reduce economic growth by creating unnecessary layers of red tape to justify its own parasitic existence). Now the Syriza coalition wants to reinstate thousands of dismissed civil servants and public broadcasting employees (including the famous finance ministry cleaning staff):

The latest Greek law calls for the rehiring of about 13,000 civil servants whose jobs were cut in an overhaul of public administration agreed by with bailout lenders by the previous Greek government. It also eliminated annual evaluations for civil servants and promotions based on merit. …

Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who — as the previous government’s minister for administrative reform — implemented past cuts, said Syriza’s legislation marked a return to the clientelist practices of the past.

As someone sympathetic to Greece’s current plight and fully aware that mass dismissals and wage cuts during a recession may be self-defeating from both the perspectives of overall economic activity and state finances, this news still gives one as an economist pause for thought. For it reveals an underlying philosophical attitude widespread among many leftists that, via government employment and generous pensions, the welfare state simply creates the income that it can subsequently tax to finance these payments in the first place. After all, the economy is just a circular flow (your expenditures are my income), and thus a generous welfare state should be in a position to bootstrap its way to an economic pepetuum mobile. No actual production or exports necessary! I became painfully aware of this after attending a discussion with Katerina Notopoulou, a member of the Syriza central committee, at the Kreisky Forum recently in Vienna. There I heard the astonishing statement that the Greek government needs to pay higher pensions so that pensioners can pay taxes (to in turn finance their pensions). While Ms. Notopoulou is a psychologist actively and commendably involved in cooperative initiatives to help citizens denied health insurance, and not an economist, this really does smack of a utopian leftwing welfare state perpetuum mobile.

Now don’t get me wrong here. I am no Tea Party fanatic who thinks that all government activity is parasitic on the “real” economy and must be eliminated. It is clear that well-designed government regulation, “night watchman” functions (police, legal system) and the provision of public goods (education, R&D, health care…) are absolutely essential for the efficient running of a modern economy. Still, this perpetuum mobile perspective is very much at odds with what one can call the “biophysical” perspective on economics: that economic activity is really a one-way flow from nature, via the productive process employing human and machine labor, to economically valuable output and wastes. And that the monetary circular flow we observe is ultimately powered by this one-way flow just like a rotating water wheel is powered by the flow of its underlying stream. But self-powered closed-circuit water wheels, aka perpetual motion machines, I thought, are impossible, even in leftwing economics.

 

A rock-crushing mill illustrated by Georgius Agricola's De Re Metallica (1556). Water enters at the top and exits at the bottom, powering the overshot wheel where, in junction with human labor, it crushes valuable ore-bearing rocks for further processing. This is an irreversible process even if the wheel is in constant circular rotation. For a good animated illustration of a returning water wheel in which the water to pumped back to the top to start the process again, see the Science Museum’s Old Bess returning Watt engine. This is not a free lunch because the steam engine must irreversibly consume coal to pump the water back. Returning engines were used during the early Industrial Revolution because water wheels provided more uniform circular motion for factories than the first steam engines could provide.

Moreover, an open economy like Greece that needs to import most of its essential commodities like energy, automobiles (remember Gregorios Sachinidis’s Mercedes 240D!) and pharmaceuticals, can only pay for them by exporting something of value to foreigners like tourism or shipping services (Greece’s two biggest exports)—unless of course the hated “troika” suddenly becomes willing to write them a blank check into the indefinite future.

So, as much as I agree with Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis that Eurozone austerity policies towards Greece have proven self-defeating and need to be thoroughly rethought, left-wingers like many influential members of Syriza still need to get real. Greece, despite the most radical internal devaluation of any Eurozone country, has a major export problem and desperately needs to find ways of putting its population back into gainful employment besides featherbedding the public employment rolls and electoral pandering to pensioners. (I reserve judgment whether the restoration of public broadcasting in some form is justifiable.)

Greece’s export performance (EL) seriously lags that of other EU bailout countries, despite more radical wage cuts (IE=Ireland, ES=Spain, PT=Portugal, LV=Latvia). Source: Böwer, Michou and Ungerer, “The Puzzle of the Missing Greek Exports,” European Commission, Economic Papers 518 (June 2014).

From Game of Turkey to Rock-Paper-Scissors: Musical Turkey for Greece?

With the Greek debt negotiations moving into their final genuinely unavoidably ultimate showdown this week, the game has incremented to a new and unprecedented level. Having started as a game of chicken (irresponsible brinkmanship), it quickly moved to what I called a game of turkey (second round postmortem blame game). This week, however, it has bootstrapped itself to yet a higher level: a three-way round-robin between Greece, the Eurogroup, and the IMF reminiscent of the famous rock-paper-scissors game dear to both children and game theorists.

Has the Greek debt game evolved to the next level: rock-paper-scissors between Greece, the Eurogroup, and the IMF?

First, why do we think the game has moved into its ultimate round (after previously predicting April 9, wrongly, as the moment of truth)? On May 12 Greece is scheduled to repay SDR 600,737,500 (around €763 million) to the IMF (after repaying SDR 157,331,282 on May 1). Since the Greek government, after plundering the cash reserves of various central government agencies to meet its last April 9 repayment, is now attempting to force all municipalities to transfer their cash balances to the Greek Central Bank, it must really be desperate and at its wit’s end (moreover, major cities like Athens have refused to comply).

But on Monday the Financial Times reported that the IMF is now insisting that any loosening of Greece’s primary surplus target (variously quoted as 3 or 4.5% depending on source and target year) be preceded by an explicit write off of Greece’s debt to be consistent with the IMF’s mandate to only bail out countries’ with sustainable sovereign debt loads.

Meanwhile, Pierre Moscovici, the European commissioner for economic affairs,  according to yesterday’s FT, now says that any discussion of debt restructuring can only take place after a program of reforms is first agreed with Greece. And Greece, in turn, has all along claimed that any reforms (with or without red lines) cannot be agreed until the primary surplus target is relaxed. Voila: paper-rock-scissors, or a European Catch-22! How this even more intricate impasse can be resolved is now anyone’s guess.

Needless to say, while this stalemate grinds on Greece’s growth and revenue prospects have only been rapidly deteriorating.

Have the Greek debt negotiations degenerated into a three-way standoff?

Sketches in European Solidarity II: Gregorios Sachinidis

    

Thessaloniki taxi driver Gregorios Sachinidis sitting for the last time behind the wheel of his record-breaking Mercedes-Benz 240D (4.6 million kilometers!) before donating it to the Mercedes-Benz Museum in 2004 (Pictures: DPA/DPAWEB via FAZ.net).

When I exploited Greek taxi driver Gregorios Sachinidis for my satirical post on the Greek bailout negotiations’ taxi connection/slander recently, I had no idea that Mr. Sachinidis really exemplified the outstanding spirit of cooperation that prevailed between Germany and Greece in the postwar period and replaced the sorry inheritance of World War II (and may be replaced in turn by the current animosity between the two countries). So let me briefly recapitulate his story in this new series I started somewhat sarcastically on Monday with Yanis Varoufakis and his channeling of ancient German battle cries (“Viel Feind, viel Ehr”), in the interests of international understanding (“Völkerverständigung”).

Mr. Sachinidis came to Germany at age 18 in 1963 as one of many “guest workers” from Greece, Turkey, Italy, Spain, Portugal and the former Yugoslavia to fill the labor gap of the postwar German “Wirtschaftswunder.” Fortunately, the powerful German unions had demanded that these “Gastarbeiter” (not to be confused with WWII “Zwangs-“ and “Sklavenarbeiter”) be paid and treated according to the regular collective bargaining contracts and not be exploited as an unprotected secondary labor market (in contrast to the recent trends of European integration). This didn’t mean that they didn’t wind up in the most undesirable housing at the margins of German society. Nevertheless, millions stayed on and benefited from the superior job opportunities Germany had to offer, sent their kids to German schools (from which many emerged as members of parliament and ministers), and largely integrated into this new and alien society.

Others, like Mr. Sachinidis in 1978, eventually returned to their home countries and invested their hard-won savings in new businesses. After 1981, when Greece first permitted Diesel taxis, Mr. Sachinidis saw his chance, and with the assistance of his brother, who had worked at Mercedes-Benz, managed to locate in Germany a used 240D, his dream taxi, and import it to Greece (being used, its deleterious effect on the Greek balance of payments was undoubtedly fairly minor). The rest is Guinness Book of Records history (not to mention that the 240D played a decisive role in impressing his fiancé enough in 1983 to marry him).

In the twenty-three-year taxi lifetime of his 240D Mr. Sachinidis proudly chauffeured such dignitaries around as German soccer star Gerd Müller (who we trust he did not overcharge) and transported humanitarian goods almost four hundred times to war-torn Serbia.

After donating the 240D to the Mercedes-Benz Museum, Mr. Sachinidis received a new C200 CDI from Alexander Paufler, president of Daimler Chrysler Hellas (after unfortunately committing the “faux pas” of having bought a French Peugeot as its replacement). Truly a heartwarming story of successful European solidarity!

 

Personal footnote: During the late 1970s, while a student at the University of Tübingen, I spent three summers building the successor model to Mr. Sachinidis’ 240D, the W123 series, at Mercedes’ main assembly plant in Sindelfingen. The amusing tales of industrial relations and Modern Times assembly-line surrealism will be, hopefully, the subject of future posts.

The successor model to Mr. Sachinidis’ 240D, the W123 series, of which I have fond memories from both the insides and outsides. (Picture: Wikimedia Commons)

 

A rare picture of me at the Mercedes-Benz plant in Sindelfingen, enjoying my summer vacations from studying economic complexity. (Picture: Wikimedia Commons)