The Greek debt talks heard a new voice on Tuesday. It might not have been the voice of reason, but it was the voice of Donald Trump.
In announcing his candidacy for U.S. president, Trump called Greece “unsalvageable” as he warned that America, with its own mounting debt, could end up just like it.
“We’re at $18 trillion now. We’re soon going to be at $20 trillion,” Trump said from the Trump Tower in Manhattan. “At $24 trillion, that’s the point of no return. We will be there soon. That’s when we become Greece! That’s when we become a country that’s unsalvageable.”
Euro area institutions and the International Monetary Fund have been locked in bailout talks with the anti-austerity Syriza government in Greece since Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras took office at the beginning of the year.
Just before mentioning Greece, Trump was holding a report from his accountant in the air and boasting of his own personal wealth, which stands at $9.240 billion (he said he has $500 million in liabilities). Expressed as a function of Greek GDP — $242.2 billion in 2013, according to the World Bank’s latest numbers — Trump’s fortune is worth just under 4 percent of Greece’s annual economic output.
Trump boasted: “In fact, one of the big banks came to me and said Donald, ‘You don’t have enough borrowings. Can we loan you $4 billion dollars?'”
Banks asking to extend credit to a borrower is certainly a foreign problem to Greece. The country has been negotiating for months over conditions for the release of the final €7.2 billion tranche from its second bailout package.