Greece - A New Hope

iannis

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It's not like anyone sane would trust the greeks to pay though, so it's hard to blame anyone for not offering that deal.

That's fundamentally a very different thing. And you gotta remember that America, France, and Britian were all up their (the survivors) collective asshole with a GUN when that deal was made. So it's kinda like, "reneg and we'll come back and kill the rest of ya. Don't reneg and we can build something out of this rubble."

The greek would choose option C. It's what they keep doing.
 

Running Dog_sl

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It's not like anyone sane would trust the greeks to pay though, so it's hard to blame anyone for not offering that deal.
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You're right, but think about it: with half their debts written off, and very favourable terms on when and how the rest would be repaid, it still took Germany more than 50 years to pay it all back. Expecting the Greeks to pay everything back and in a shorter space of time seems crazy. There's no reason to trust they'll do what they say, but in that case you might as well write off most of what they owe anyway.

The IMF position is that a large part of the debt has to be written off for there to be any chance of getting the rest paid back. Of course, that IMF report on this didn't go down well in the EU

The document released in Washington on Thursday said Greece's public finances will not be sustainable without substantial debt relief, possibly including write-offs by European partners of loans guaranteed by taxpayers. It also said Greece will need at least 50 billion euros in additional aid over the next three years to keep itself afloat.

.. At a meeting on the International Monetary Fund's board on Wednesday, European members questioned the timing of the report... There was no vote but the Europeans were heavily outnumbered and the United States, the strongest voice in the IMF, was in favour of publication.

...The IMF argues that Greece's debt burden of nearly 185 percent of gross domestic product can only be made sustainable if the euro zone provides considerable extra financing through a mixture of new loans and a debt restructuring.

This is politically anathema in Germany, the biggest creditor country, and most other euro zone states, where no leader wants to explain to taxpayers that the money they lent to Athens will never be coming back
Europeans tried to block IMF debt report on Greece: Sources | The Financial Express
 

Palum

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Greece is like a big 38 Studios. It's just gone Germany, all they had was an idea and lots of expenses.
 

fanaskin

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iannis

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Well, yeah. It does seem like they have an absolutely unrealistic debt. The creditors drove that car until the wheels fell off.

I don't think you can do nation building before you do some nation destruction. I know that sounds a bit ignorant and arrogantly american. But as long as the political systems are in place, as long as the greeks have the option to vote "Uhh.... no?" you can't offer a nation building deal. Because you'll have to offer it to the exact men who you just fucked for the past 10 years and who have been fucking you for the past 3. It's actually much harder than if there was just nothing there to work with. Even the Weimar Republic would be better than what greece has (for the creditors, and the rest of the EU. Be plenty shitty for the greeks... no idea if it would be more or less shitty than what they currently have).

But it's not like we did a great job in Iraq. They never stood up.

I kinda don't think the Greeks have the stand up mentality either. They just like the part where they get money for not robbing everyone else.
 

Gavinmad

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Maybe I'm oversimplifying things, but isn't this whole debacle a fantastic example of how the European Union is doomed to fail? They basically have all the drawbacks of both a group of individual states as well as a single nation, but none of the benefits. How fucked up would the United States be if an economic powerhouse like California was able to engage in predatory lending practices with Illinois or any other state on the brink of bankruptcy?
 

khorum

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No that's basically it. If Greece were in the U.S. They would've gotten fiscal transfers and federal subsidies like Alabama and Mississippi does all the time.
 

Frenzied Wombat

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It's doomed to fail for the similar reasons unfettered multiculturalism is failing. Culturally, places like Italy, Greece, and Spain will never be economically compatible/competitive with countries such as Germany and the UK. The former countries will always be an albatross around the necks of the latter.
 

Lendarios

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So the guy who was rallying up the greeks against the Euro has now quit. What a scumbag.

A deal similar to Germany will not work, where a percent of exports was the ceiling. Greece has a service economy and their best product is olive oil. Combine this with an Olympic level of tax avoidance, and it makes for a very easy way for Greece to cheat the loan.
 

fanaskin

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It's doomed to fail for the similar reasons unfettered multiculturalism is failing. Culturally, places like Italy, Greece, and Spain will never be economically compatible/competitive with countries such as Germany and the UK. The former countries will always be an albatross around the necks of the latter.
we have those places in america but people say "move out of Alabama" or wherever it's shitty and get a job in another state, in the united states people didn't think of themselves of citizens of a nation first unitl AFTER the civil war. I can't imagine people saying "move out of greece go to poland" or whatever. although they do have freedom of movement between members, most of them don't like it.
 

Running Dog_sl

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So the guy who was rallying up the greeks against the Euro has now quit. What a scumbag.

A deal similar to Germany will not work, where a percent of exports was the ceiling. Greece has a service economy and their best product is olive oil. Combine this with an Olympic level of tax avoidance, and it makes for a very easy way for Greece to cheat the loan.
If you mean Varoufakis, he was pushed out by the creditors; they didn't want him at any more meetings.

Announcing his resignation in a blog post entitled ?Minister No More!? on Monday, he wrote: ?Soon after the announcement of the referendum results, I was made aware of a certain preference by some Eurogroup participants [eurozone finance ministers], and assorted ?partners?, for my ? ?absence? from its meetings; an idea that the prime minister judged to be potentially helpful to him in reaching an agreement. For this reason I am leaving the Ministry of Finance today.
Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis resigns despite referendum no vote | World news | The Guardian
 

khorum

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Well that's true but really it's more about how fundamentally unsound Greece is. You got all these guys blaming Austerity or Teutonic discipline or Capitalism---but all those things worked to lift the other PIIGS countries out of the recession. While Spain still has another 18+ months before it's back to pre-2008 heights, it's been growing faster than any of the other large EU economies and is poised to get their8th consecutive quarterof growing faster than even the UK.

But socioeconomically Greece isn't really like the rest of the EU. We've all seen how the Greeks could've paid off a full third of their entire debt load if they had just done the basicgovernmental job of collecting taxes. But if you listened to the socialists the Greeks persist in putting into office, they've been taxed into destitution over the last four years.

In fact, the Greeks pay less taxes than many of the Northern Europeans. The Greek corporate tax rate is 26% (vs. 30% in Germany and 33% in France) and their individual tax is 42% (vs. 45% in both Germany and France). Their VAT tax, a major sticking point in the last round of negotiations, is lower than Denmark or most of Scandinavia. But really, those tax rates are only important if you have a government that wasn't a puerile sociologist's fan-fiction version of a contemporary utopia, because a functional EU state wouldn't produce outcomes like this:

OdsKOO7.png


That stray-dog-o-meter is probably spot on when contemplating the Greek disposition regarding their civic institutions. As "predatory" as those bond movements may seem, remember that Ireland and Spain have gotten similarly bitter medicine, butmedicine it was. With Greece, though, the leftist press like to claim it was a poison pill, but actually it's more like the patient was a chronic recidivist and was too far gone.

If anything, those lenders have shown extraordinary leeway by lending to Greece at all, given what they know about it. Recently, a lot of economists have been pointing out that Greece should have never been allowed in the Euro. That's because most people don't realize that Greece has been in a state of fiscal default or bankruptcy forHALF ITS EXISTENCE as an independent state. Furthermore, although its economic history under three centuries of Ottoman rule is blurry (the Ottomans accepted children as tax payments), the fact is the previous incarnation of Greek self-rule---The Byzantines---also fell apart largely because of economic mismanagement. And THEY got chumped by their Venetian creditors too.

Basically the last millenia or so of Greek history has been a fiscal clownshow of the same cripple falling down the exact same flight of stairs for about a thousand years.
 

fanaskin

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I mean if they weren't in the euro they could inflate their money supply to do what they want, if they want to live like that so be it, the EU should never have taken them. The EU knew what greece was like when they did, they tried to say greece lied but I think that's bullshit they knew.
 
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I think some of you people are mixing up EU and the eurozone. EU has 28 members and 19 out of these make the eurozone. EU itself has been fairly successful (we haven't started a world war for quite a while now). On the other hand Euro currency is turning out to be a massive mistake, especially letting some of these clown countries in it. Sweden and United Kingdom for example are part of the EU but still use their own currencies.
 

khorum

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Just about everyone agrees that Greece should NOT have been in the euro, yeah. If they had kept he drachma, their tourism sector (a quarter of their total output) would've kept the rest of their domestic industry afloat---even if noone paid taxes. In fact, there was a paper a few years ago that quantified how much being under the euro vs. the drachma turned the Athens Olympics into a net-negative outcome for Greek tourism in the years afterwards. The EU media of the time dwelled on the unfavorable costs (in euros) of vacationing in Greece vs. Spain or Italy. In fact, the euro has had a dragging effect in tourism in all the Mediterranean tourist destinations except the ones that DON'T use the Euro like Tunisia, which had become such a massive tourist trap that ISIS targetted it.
 

Furry

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I think greece is genius. They figured out how incapable europeans are of saying no and latched onto that teet to suck it dry. Even now, when greece has shown it is entirely too retarded to ever be changed from its ways, greece is doing the equivalent of saying "might I have another".

Everyone already knew how stupid greece was. I think the lesson to be learned here is how stupid the EU as a whole is.
 

Lithose

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Yeah, and that is the salient issue. If the Eurozone were to work? The bail outs Greece has gottenshouldn'thave been loans; they should have been supplements much like we send money to West Virginia, or some other backwater hell hole with a resource economy. Because without the option to devalue their currency, they need assistance from the stronger economies. In addition, each state should have institutional power to standardize what is expected of spending; and check on things like corruption (Allowing outside fixes to the system--Germany should be supplementing Greece, but it should also have a say in fixing Greece's corruption). These are things that make a fiat union work--it's why it works in the U.S. even though Alabama and NY/Texas are somehow using the same currency, even though their economies should requirefardifferent currencies.
 

Frenzied Wombat

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Nobody can fix Greece's corruption problem except themselves-- it's a cultural issue. It can't be fixed by external forces anymore than our ability to get the Muslim world to start being productive and invent something rather than praying 5 times a day.

One thing you quickly realize when you travel the world is that all cultures are definitely not equal. Almost every one has positives/negatives, but from a "net" standpoint they are far from equal. Greeks are friendly and outgoing, make amazing food, but are obsessed with finding shortcuts for everything and embrace hedonism over productivity.
 

Lithose

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Nobody can fix Greece's corruption problem except themselves-- it's a cultural issue. It can't be fixed by external forces anymore than our ability to get the Muslim world to start being productive and invent something rather than praying 5 times a day.

One thing you quickly realize when you travel the world is that all cultures are definitely not equal. Almost every one has positives/negatives, but from a "net" standpoint they are far from equal. Greeks are friendly and outgoing, make amazing food, but are obsessed with finding shortcuts for everything and embrace hedonism over productivity.
There's a lot you can't fix--but there is a lot you can, too. Some of Greece's corruption is just lazy, an outside audit could easily wipe it out. I mean some of it is really just extreme, we aren't talking the national pride in avoiding taxation ect. We are talking whole agencies that don't exist and just collect money.
 

Lendarios

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If you mean Varoufakis, he was pushed out by the creditors; they didn't want him at any more meetings.



Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis resigns despite referendum no vote | World news | The Guardian
He called the other side terrorists, and plenty of other terms. He was more infatuated with his persona/image than to get anything done. Also, he wasn't asked to quit, he was asked not to be at the negotiations. He quit because he was shut out due to his own bravado/agenda.