Greece - A New Hope

There's nothing americans won't tax. I bet the formula industry would kill for a breast milk tax.

Worse, I'm arguing for puerto rico.

Ossoi_sl said:

We've never understood Greece because we have refused to see the crisis for what it was-a continuation of a series of bailouts for the financial sector that started in 2008 and that rumbles on today. It's so much easier to blame the Greeks and then be surprised when they refuse to play along with the script.

Click to expand...

That sounds familiar. The financial sector is truly a cancer on the world. If you watch the Harvey video, it mentions this very same point above -- about how capitalismneversolves its problems; it just moves them around.

Greece is doing exactly what they should do. They should go a step further like Iceland and jail the financiers for fraud when they step foot in Greece.

It looks like a deal is in the works. The Greeks get some debt relief and refinancing, while the creditors get an even tougher bout of Greek austerity than the Greeks rejected in their referendum just days ago.

The IMF's Olivier Blanchard has made an interesting post about what went wrong with the attempts to solve Greece's problems:

Until the referendum and its potential implications for growth, we believed that... debt sustainability could be achieved through the rescheduling of existing debt, and long maturities for new debt... Our assessment was seen as too pessimistic by our European partners to whom we had communicated our views about the need for debt relief long before publishing the debt sustainability analysis.

...Fundamentally, the Euro area faces a political choice: lower reforms and fiscal targets for Greece means a higher cost for the creditor countries.

Click to expand...

Greece: Past Critiques and the Path Forward | iMFdirect - The IMF Blog

Top right is the signature of the new finance minister of Greece. Somehow it seems so fitting.

What a bunch of fucking pussies, utter capitulation to the EU is in the works.

Fucking blueballed us for 6 months with thoughts that they might bring chaos to the region. Just eat the dick immediately if that's what you were going to do in the first place.

I blame Nigel Farage. Just couldn't contain his raging hardon for eurogeddon and he just HAD to tweet some backhanded support for the Greeks. Some whitehouse staffers actually retweeted that shit and I'm sure it supported Obama's decision to lean on Merkel.

An earlier Grexit would've made next year's UK referendum on the EU much a slam-dunk. The Greeks will still fail at being a real economy though, not because of some flawed deal but because they're really institutionally undisciplined. Guess the British eurosceptics will just have to actually campaign now.

Who knows, maybe the older cadre in Syriza's politburo will shoot down the austerity package, insufficient as it is.

Greek Pride.

Who knows. I'm guessing they did it to force the Eu's hand thinking they'd back down and realized no one gave a shit. So now they are scrambling for a last minute appeal with all the same things they said they didn't want and more because they realize they are fucked.

khorum_sl said:

. The Greeks will still fail at being a real economy though, not because of some flawed deal but because they're really institutionally undisciplined.

Click to expand...

Do you ever get tired of being wrong all the time, out of interest?

Itzena_sl said:

Do you ever get tired of being wrong all the time, out of interest?

Click to expand...

Do you ever get tired of posting irrelevant images all the time, out of interest?

How would that prove me wrong when I've mentioned it before? The Greeks work longer because their economy is filled with more self-employed individuals than anyone else in the EU. Of those, more than three quarters are in TOURISM or hospitality, low-productivity jobs with longer but more relaxed hours than export-driven manufacturing or knowledge service jobs:



Even then, the reason there's so much self-employment is because DECLARING to be self-employed is a well-known tax loopholeempowered by Greek banks themselves:

UCB/UC Study_sl said:

We show that in semiformal economies, banks lend to tax-evading individuals based on the bank's perception of the individual's true income. This observation leads to a novel approach to estimate tax evasion using the adaptation of the private sector to the norms of semiformality. We use bank microdata on household credit, and replicate the bank model of credit capacity decision to infer the bank's estimate of individuals' true income. We estimate a lower bound of 28.2 billion euros of unreported income for Greece. The foregone government revenues amount to 32% of the deficit for 2009.

Click to expand...

That's institutional dysfunction that is so ubiquitous that it's not recognized as a dysfunction among the Greeks at all. It's just how everyone evades taxes because civic discipline and austerity is for teutonic fascists.

At MINIMUM the Greek state is missing out on 28 billion euros in revenue due to tax fraud enabled by its own government. That's four times the amount of the last bailout and fourteen times the amount they defaulted on the IMF for.

Here I thought the birthplace of democracy was to be the place to fight for it once more, since America obviously doesn't. Alas.

Well there'sone thing we aren't taxingthat would net almost $14 billion annually if we did.

Think of all the al-Shifa's we could be building then bombing with that much money.

Itzena_sl said:

Do you ever get tired of being wrong all the time, out of interest?

Click to expand...

Ever get tired of not understanding what words mean? Working longer is an absolutely meaningless statistic. If you mark down you work 16 hours per day, yet accomplish nothing, your economy will still shit the bed. The Greeks, from a productivity stand point,are about half as productive as the U.S. While Germany and France come in at around 90% of what the U.S. does.

When Khorum says institutionally undisciplined, he isn't stating they are lazy--but rather there are factors severely hampering their productivity due toinstitutionaldeficiencies (As well as differences in market focus, and job requirements). This comes from corruption, over regulation (or under), lack of technology, laziness (Can be an aspect) and can even extend to things like the type of market (But usually technology, and efficiency play a huge part...). The fact is, while say the Germans work less? They get a shit ton more done per hour because their countries institutions, like their corporate governance, infrastructure, permit/regulation controls. technology and other factors do notsuck ass.

Greece, on the other hand, is pretty much shit in all those fields. So they produce a lot less, even when equalizing for purchasing power.

Wait... On the George Zimmerman race greyscale of convenience aren't Greeks white? How can they possibly be failing with all those privileged olive skinned white males?

Palum_sl said:

Wait... On the George Zimmerman race greyscale of convenience aren't Greeks white? How can they possibly be failing with all those privileged olive skinned white males?

Click to expand...

Well, us Mediterranean types, Italians and Greeks? We only recently became white, so we're still getting used to theprivilege. It's like the Irish, up until 70 years ago the WASP white people essentially saw us as European Mexicans. I guess the Greeks haven't gotten the memo that they are now white, and not a species of brown person, and thus can't work really long hours and make very little anymore (You know, bad for the white people image).