Greece - A New Hope

Heylel

Heylel

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Running Dog_sl said:
It would be better to frame the vote as a choice between a bad and a worse thing. Whichever way they voted, the Greek people are screwed; at least this way they get the slim satisfaction of giving the Eurozone the finger.

No-one really knows how this is going to play out now. It's a collision between economics and politics.

Economics would say the creditor countries have to write off a substantial amount of what the Greeks owe them but Eurozone politics don't allow them to do that (the IMF has a more realistic view as revealed by leaked reports over the weekend). Having spent months detailing how feckless the Greeks have been with the money lent to them the Europeans would now have to explain to their voters that a large part of that money will never be repaid. The risk to the Eurozone politicians is that their own voters might finally begin to ask exactly why so much of their money was given to a country even after it became clear that country was an economic basket case, and who made those decisions.
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Well, the vast majority of those loans were just servicing the interest on other loans. The entire country is trapped in a large-scale equivalent of payday loan / title pawn traps. They can't afford their debt, so they take on more debt just to keep the old debt current while the water keeps rising.

Only in this case, there's no car to repossess.
 
General Antony

General Antony

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Heylel_sl said:
Well, the vast majority of those loans were just servicing the interest on other loans. The entire country is trapped in a large-scale equivalent of payday loan / title pawn traps. They can't afford their debt, so they take on more debt just to keep the old debt current while the water keeps rising.

Only in this case, there's no car to repossess.
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Sure there is, send in the Wehrmacht and seize it.
 
Nester

Nester

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Maybe we should crowd fund us some money and buy some Greek artifacts before they get stolen/destroyed in the upcoming fallout.

lets buy the Pantheon and host Lan's inside it!

Move it brick by brick to North America like London bridge in Arizona =D


Other countries in the North Med seem to have major problems with illegal immigrates, does Greece? you never really hear about it but it seems like it would be the perfect breading ground for religious fanaticism during the current crisis.
 
khorum

khorum

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Lleauaric_sl said:
Omg. Stray dogs everywhere...

But we found one that attached to us for some reason. Slept outside our hotel and waited for us.. did wide circles around us as we walked home from bars and barked at shady people who stepped close. Was kinda awesome...

But yeah.. dogs are like pigeons in Athens.
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Iannis_sl said:
That's actually a pretty clever metric.

Fuckin japs.
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LOL figures.

It's the first thing anyone who steps outside the developed world notices: the fucking stray dogs. Whether it's a whorecation in Tijuana or your first deployment to the sandbox that's your first "Hey-we're-not-in-the-First-World-anymore" sign. It's hard to fake culturally, which is why you'll see scabby rotting dog corpses littering the gutters next to quarter-million-dollar Ferraris in Dubai but you won't see many stray dogs at all in Singapore or Nagano.
 
khorum

khorum

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Oh I don't doubt it. The Greeks had been administered by the Ottomans for almost three centuries, after all. Though the Turks would've bailed them out if they'd been part of THEIR monetary union, haha.
 
Big Phoenix

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Nester_sl said:
Maybe we should crowd fund us some money and buy some Greek artifacts before they get stolen/destroyed in the upcoming fallout.

lets buy the Pantheon and host Lan's inside it!

Move it brick by brick to North America like London bridge in Arizona =D


Other countries in the North Med seem to have major problems with illegal immigrates, does Greece? you never really hear about it but it seems like it would be the perfect breading ground for religious fanaticism during the current crisis.
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Bro pantheon is Rome. Parthenon is Athens.
 
Xeldar

Xeldar

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Greece should have never been on the euro. They effectively ceded monetary policy to German banekrs on a quasi-gold standard when they needed 5-12% inflation. Good riddance.
 
Nester

Nester

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Bleh I ment Parthenon
wink.png
 
Xequecal

Xequecal

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It's got a lot more to do with the fact that their balanced budget amendment makes it impossible for them to fund one. The effective total tax burden on all but the poorest Germans is approaching 70%, for them to spend the same % of their GDP on a military that the US does, it would entail a 20-30% cut to the take home pay of most German workers.
 
D

Dumar_sl

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Piketty lobbing more truth grenades around the world.

Piketty: Germany's stance on Greece is a grave danger to Europe - Fortune

Thomas Piketty_sl said:
When I hear the Germans say that they maintain a very moral stance about debt and strongly believe that debts must be repaid, then I think: what a huge joke! Germany is the country that has never repaid its debts. It has no standing to lecture other nations [...]

Piketty?s suggestion is that countries in the euro come together for a debt conference call ?to determine the maximum allowable budget deficit in order to prevent the regrowth of debt,? starting with Greece. If they don?t, Piketty has a warning for German Chancellor Angela Merkel: ?Those who want to chase Greece out of the eurozone today will end up on the trash heap of history.?
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fanaskin

fanaskin

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I said that a while back large portions of germany's debt was written off in like the 60's I think.
 
R

Running Dog_sl

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fanaskin_sl said:
I said that a while back large portions of germany's debt was written off in like the 60's I think.
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According to Wikipedia it was earlier; the debt was halved and the remainder paid off over a long period of time, with the last payment coming in 2010. Needless to say the Germans aren't offering anything like this to the Greeks.

The London Agreement on German External Debts... was a debt relief treaty between the Federal Republic of Germany and creditor nations. It was concluded in London during negotiations which lasted from February 27 to August 8, 1953.

The total under negotiation was 16 billion marks of debt resulting from the Treaty of Versailles after World War I which had not been paid in the 1930s, but which Germany decided to repay to restore its reputation. This money was owed to government and private banks in the U.S., France and Britain. Another 16 billion marks represented postwar loans by the U.S. Under the London Debts Agreement of 1953, the repayable amount was reduced by 50% to about 15 billion marks and stretched out over 30 years...

An important term of the agreement was that repayments were only due while West Germany ran a trade surplus, and that repayments were limited to 3% of export earnings. This gave Germany's creditors a powerful incentive to import German goods
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London Agreement on German External Debts - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
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