By Tim Worstall, Forbes

We’re hearing more now about the deal that Greece was able to make with the eurozone group last night. The most important part of the deal, as far as Tsipras and Varoufakis are concerned at least, is that they no longer have to hold to the idea of running a 4.5% of GDP primary budget surplus next year. That does give them some room, within the current Greek budget, to loosen conditions and meet some of their election promises. However, the entire thing is by no means over yet. The next hurdle is to present their reforms to the same group on Monday:

With his left-wing leadership pilloried by German conservatives, Tsipras insisted defiantly that Friday night’s agreement cancelled austerity commitments and dispensed with the “troika” – European and IMF inspectors loathed by many Greeks.

“Yesterday we took a decisive step, leaving austerity, the bailouts and the troika behind,” he said in a televised statement to the Greek nation. “We won a battle, not the war. The difficulties, the real difficulties … are ahead of us.”

After often ill-tempered negotiations in Brussels, Greece secured a four-month extension to euro zone funding, which will avert bankruptcy and a euro exit, provided it comes up with promises of economic reforms by Monday.

However, things were rather closer than we’d all assumed. There’s been serious worries that (Greece has a long weekend this week) there would have been a serious bank run in Greece on Tuesday if a deal had not been done. There were intimations of the beginnings of one on Friday: some €1 billion was moved out of the country’s banks according to reports.

And what we’re really getting here is a series of claims and counter claims about who has had to give in and who hasn’t. There’s effectively three groups of people here to make claims. First is obviously Tsipras and his colleagues in Syriza. They are claiming that the Eurogroup blinked first and caved into their demands. And they most certainly didn’t get everything they wanted, the Greeks, but they did get that significant concession on how large a budget surplus they have to run. That does, as above, give them some fiscal room to change some policies in Greece.

The second group that can make claims, and are doing so, are the normal members of the Eurogroup itself. They can say to their own taxpayers that they’ve not let Greece off any of the debt so there will be no losses. This isn’t quite true as it’s fairly obvious that the interest and maturity terms will be changed on the debts over the next few months. This has the effect of creating losses for those taxpayers. But, as long as the principal sum remains intact politicians should be able to shrug that off.

Then there’s the politicians from the other Eurogroup countries that have had to go through their own austerity programs. They obvious can’t go home and tell their electors that the Greeks didn’t have to do what the Portuguese or Irish did have to do. So, obviously, that’s not what they are saying:

Ireland, which had to make deep budget cuts under its own EU/IMF bailout programme, spelt out the uncomfortable truth that the euro zone had yielded nothing to the Greeks, for all the brave talk from Tsipras.

“Their political problem is that this a reversal of their election position. There is absolutely nothing on the table that could be considered a concession,” Irish finance minister Michael Noonan said.

“They’re now compromising and compromising quite significantly,” he told national broadcaster RTE, but made clear Athens had had little choice. “The biggest threat to Greece was that their banking system would go belly up next Wednesday.”

In effect, everyone has won enough that they can claim victory but no one has won enough that anyone can claim that they were defeated. The usual political end point therefore.

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