Greek debt crisis [update: 3rd Bailout deal reached]

[Simon_Jester]

So who are the people shorthanding all that stuff to lazy? As mentioned above I rarely see anybody do this besides either Greeks cited in newspapers or Greece friendly articles by non Greeks.

It's the pro-Greek side using 'lazy' as a shorthand for a diverse array of criticisms that all summarize as "the reason the Greeks have problems is because they have this vice or that vice, and so the way to solve the problem is to treat them like they're children and spank* them until they behave better!"

There are probably at least a dozen versions of that argument, but they all reduce to "Greece suffers because of a lack of Greek virtue, and it is the role of the 'adult' European powers to take up the white man's burden help Greece acquire the virtues it needs." All these arguments are then used, in varying forms, to justify putting into motion a series of policies that avoid doing the things Greece needs, in favor of doing things that will benefit foreign creditors.

It is very much like the approach taken by the Republican Party in the US: private sector good, virtuous people always get rich, you're poor because you lack virtues, so we should not only not help you, we shouldn't even refrain from hurting you, because you lack virtue, you terrible person, you.
______________

*[And if, by any chance, you don't believe in spanking as a means of remedying child behavioral problems... consider why spanking a country is a better idea]

I agree that it would be counter productive to call people lazy because lazy implies a negative character trait (imo it´s good trait but that´s besides the point). So how would one critisize the pension system for example without some Greeks feeling personally insulted?

Well, what's your perceived problem with the pension system? Once we know that, the challenge is simply to make your objections fact-based, rather than using the sort of idiot moralizing about "welfare queens" the Republican Party in the US uses when it wants to get rid of a chunk of the American welfare system.

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The KFW is the official state development bank of Germany. Of course the German Finance Minister is the chairman of this wholly state-owned bank. Look up the British Business Bank for a comparison, you idiot.

So why not be upfront and be honest with 'give me all your shit' rather than 'deposit all your shit in tax haven Luxembourg under a shell organisation which I totally own'? Do one prat.

If "all the profits will either serve the debt of Greece or be invested into the Greek econmy as stimuli" is "give me all your shit", then you must be a very small mind indeed.

As the Greek debt grows larger, it will become impossible for a fund which invests in the Greek economy and tracks its growth to grow fast enough to outrun the size of the debt. In which case a larger and larger share of the profits will end up "serving the debt of greece," which is to say "serving the creditors of Greece," at which point the creditors are doing rather well out of their control over the fund, since it's a steady little money-maker that pays them several billion euros a year more or less in perpetuity...

Unless the Greeks somehow pay down the debt. And we're seeing multiple people, including the IMF apparently, all of whom say that paying down the debt is impossible without debt restructuring.

This passage here is not meant to address the question of whether the restructuring will ever happen. I will address that later. The point here is simply and solely that unless the Greek debt is made payable (or was secretly payable all along no matter what the IMF thought), a predictable thing will happen. Any set of Greek assets controlled by foreigners and used to service the Greek debt will become a mechanism by which said foreigners can harvest a revenue stream of up to several billion euros a year from the Greek economy.

Well a majority would happen to be European voters; do you live inside your bubble?

And these European voters can make their votes count in elections. Screaming how an offer made by democratically elected governments to another democratically elected government is a coup does not make you look rational, it just makes you look like a child who whines and screams because they didn't get their way.

When a set of democratically elected governments come up to a single government which they have a major advantage over, and coerce the single government into ignoring last week's referendum and agreeing to many of the same things it expressly didn't want...

"Coup" is not the right word, perhaps. But we really don't have a word for "small government is forced to capitulate to a series of humiliating terms that turn it into a de facto puppet of foreign interests that no longer carries out the will of its electorate."

Such a word would be useful; "coup" is being used as a rather crude substitute.

"Greeks are lazy" is a convenient shorthand for "Greeks expect excessive entitlements from their welfare responsibilities," "Greeks shirk their responsibilities like paying taxes," "Greeks are lax in honoring obligations like enacting meaningful anti-corruption laws," and so on. All of which ARE things the Greeks are commonly criticized for, including in this thread.

So 'lazy' becomes a shorthand for all the various ways in which the Greeks are accused of bad practices, with the (frequent) implication that the problem is a lack of some virtue on the part of the Greeks.

Bullshit, Simon. You take valid criticisms like "Greeks shirk their responsibilities like paying taxes" - which nobody has ever disputed - and then try to twist them into some un-PC-expression. That is not the level of discourse around here and you should know better. Have some intellectual honesty.

I am attempting to explain why pro-Greeks summarize arguments like "Greeks shirk their responsibilities like paying taxes, and Greeks expect to retire at fifty, and Greeks don't work hard enough, and Greeks are reckless about debt, and so on..." with the much shorter, more compact "Greeks are lazy."

Personally, my only objection to the "Greeks are lazy" category of argument is that even if they are true, even if the Greeks really are a nation of filthy shirkers... the current set of policies won't serve any purpose. Except to ultimately strip Greece of what assets it still possesses despite, apparently, having been a nation of inferior lazy shirkers since at the latest the time of the Byzantines.

BTW, there is the prospect for a restructure of the debt at the later date, if the creditors can see, that the Greeks honour the agreement this time.

And when- not if, when- the Greeks run into obstacles of any kind in "honoring" the agreement on schedule, the debt restructuring will instantly be retracted

Bullshit. It will be slowed down until the obstacles are fixed. You can't just retract something that has already gone through.

That depends heavily on the precise wording of the agreement. I will confess that I've been relying on third party summaries of the agreement.

Suffice to say that the world already has a LOT of experience with the kind of treaties that nations like Britain, France, and Germany sign with heavily indebted nations they're planning to use as a cash cow. We spent much of the 19th and 20th centuries in a world where that was one of the many tools in the imperialist arsenal. And it is quite common for such a treaty to "appear" to leave the indebted nation with a way out, while in fact making it nearly impossible for them to escape the debt trap without the permission of a foreign master.

Because, assuming the European creditors aren't morons, the only rational explanation left is that this is all an elaborate structure intended to provide a legal cover for stripping Greek assets. The European creditor nations have every reason to plunder Greece rather than forgiving its debts, even if that would be vastly worse for Greece.

Why would anybody want to plunder Greece? Tell me that. To what end? And how is this worth the damage to the European product?

I mean, are you so delusional to think that Greece, with their 2% of the Eurozone economy, is a worthwhile target to plunder? Do you really think that this is worth spending all the time and effort and to throw over half a trillion of Euros into it? If that is supposed to be plunder, then I am getting a very bad return.

Much of that half trillion Euros was thrown into Greece by private banks- that decision was on par with a lot of bad lending that took place up to 2008. I can't say what Goldman Sachs and so on were thinking back in 2005. They were probably not explicitly planning to plunder Greece, but they were planning to do a series of things that eventually crashed the world economy, so I have no approval for them.

What then happened is that European governments took on this pile of bad debt, and had to decide from the start what to do with it...

The problem is, the debt was never payable, unless not only aerius but also, apparently, the IMF was mistaken.

What do you do with an unrepayable debt, owed by a nation whose economy is collapsing? You have three choices:

1) Forgive the debt. In which case, if you wound up owning this debt through the bailout of a bunch of private banks, you get nothing to repay all that taxpayer money you just gave to your too-big-to-fail banks. So if you want to recover the money you want to try...

2) Hold the debt indefinitely and profit from the stream of interest, at least until the debtor nation collapses from economic exhaustion. Greece is already at the edge of exhaustion so this strategy isn't going to work, which leaves...

3) Seize control of whatever capital assets and property you can within the debtor nation, to at least partially recover the debt. In other words, plunder the debtor nation (e.g. the French occupation of the Ruhr).

The loans were not originally made with the intent of plundering Greece, but at this point in time there is nothing the lenders can do BUT plunder Greece if they want their money back. Therefore, I am unsurprised to see any behavior on the part of the lenders, that would make it easier for them to plunder Greece.

Thing is, aerius isn't asking you to cry. He's asking you to do basic arithmetic and recognize that the Greek economy cannot support interest payments of seven or eight billion euros a year without crippling consequences... and that this is the level of interest payment they're being expected to make just to stay afloat, let alone to ever repay the debt and escape it.

It is not. FFS, it is almost like nobody ever reads the issues. Nobody who is whining about unsustainable debt has presumably read about the fact that the whole debt would be restructured under the QE program, thus turning it effectively into giant subsidies with any interest payyments being returned to Greece (and the creditors thus losing yearly money due to inflation).

Would you mind linking to the post where you previously mentioned this? Or to the source where you heard about it? I'll even take a German language source; I can pick my way through some bits of written German and rely on translation software when I can't.

What the EuroTards don't realise is that in countries like Australia, America and Canada people don't give a shit that there are constant fiscal transfers to the weaker states like Mississippi without any promises of repayment. For the most part, we love our countries and think nothing of it. The idea of completely humiliating and impoverishing a member state for years or decades on end is completely repellent and would never be seriously considered. For this reason, the Euro and the EU's response to Greece is a complete inditement on what a failure the whole economic zone is.

Guess what? The Eurozone is not a single country. If it were a political union with every vote being counted equally, with common rules, a common Government and a common parliament with true legislative powers then it would have transfers as well. But the political union was explicitly rejected by the voters of Ireland and France (despite Germany being for it). You can't compare the EU with another country if it is not a country, just a collection of states.

Right- but bobalot's criticism is that the economic zone in its present state is a failure. You can argue that this failure was inevitable due to France and Ireland rejecting a political union... but it's still a failure.

And it's a failure that many of the weaker states will want to bail out of, given that the EU project in its present state is being used as a vehicle to degrade, humiliate, and impoverish one of its weakest states. Granted this might not be happening if political union were feasible. Granted that Greece should probably never have been let into the Eurozone and the EU in the first place. But if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. It's irrelevant whether things should have gone differently- they didn't, the EU is what it is, and the way Greece is being treated is a powerful message to countries like Italy, Portugal, and Spain about how they will be treated if they become similarly vulnerable.

The fuck? Germany is the pack leader, and worse it's a country that 'claims' to know what it is doing and yet has repeatedly, consistently insists on goals that cannot be met and when they aren't they old 'they didn't try hard enough meme' gets trotted out.

Let me help you;

Code: Select all

Greek Economy        Greek Debt
     €237bn             €310bn

GDP Growth          Interest on Debt
     0.2%                   4%

DO YOU SEE A PROBLEM? You don't need a fucking degree to understand how it is IMPOSSIBLE for Greece to pay that back, and the solution? Give them €84bn more debt!

WHAT. THE. FUCK!

I'm losing my fucking mind, this is what it feels like to lose one's mind.

You can't lose what you never had in the first place.

The interest on Greek debt is not 4% of GDP either. It is 2.1% as has been pointed out before and will be even less in the future.

He didn't say "the interest on Greek debt is 4% of GDP." He said "the interest rate on Greek debt is 4%." Are you sure you're correcting him on the right fact?

There was never any agenda other than complete and utter subjugation of Greece by the Europgroup irrespective of Tsipras or Varoufakis or SYRIZA's behaviour. To say otherwise is to basically admit that the current 'bailout' is more punitive than necessary just out of sheer spite.

Subjugate that insignificant little nation? For what purpose? For what gain? Strategic Gyros purposes?

Also, nice to know that subjugation translates into "half a trillion Euros".

If the half trillion Euros are a loan, then they are simply the mechanism by which creditors hope to eventually get back up to half a trillion Euros from Greece. More than that if they're lucky, less if (as is probably the case) the Greek economy collapses from exhaustion at trying to meet the demands of its creditors.

A loan is not a gift and it's disingenuous to call it one.

Plus, of course, everything I discussed above, in particular:

"The loans were not originally made with the intent of plundering Greece, but at this point in time there is nothing the lenders can do BUT plunder Greece if they want their money back. Therefore, I am unsurprised to see any behavior on the part of the lenders, that would make it easier for them to plunder Greece."

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"Greeks are lazy" is a convenient shorthand for "Greeks expect excessive entitlements from their welfare responsibilities," "Greeks shirk their responsibilities like paying taxes," "Greeks are lax in honoring obligations like enacting meaningful anti-corruption laws," and so on. All of which ARE things the Greeks are commonly criticized for, including in this thread.

So 'lazy' becomes a shorthand for all the various ways in which the Greeks are accused of bad practices, with the (frequent) implication that the problem is a lack of some virtue on the part of the Greeks.

Now, my main issue with calling the Greeks 'lazy' is that even if it is true, it doesn't solve anything. And if we start punishing countries for their citizens having vices like 'lazy,' and if the punishment is to have your assets stripped and be thrown into an economic pit...

That's not a world order decent people would want to live under, I think.

But it is. When somebody is "lazy" (read: refuses to pay their taxes), we do throw them into a pit. We call it "prison", and we do it because refusing to pay your taxes is a crime. And in 2006, 40% of all Greek companies were committing this crime. Public servants were corrupt to the point of inventing entire fictional organisations to funnel money into their own pockets. If it is necessary to forgive Greece's debts, fine. But it should come after Greece has stopped being such a den of scum and villainy, not before.

So do you propose to throw Greece itself into debtor's prison, for the crime of "being a den of scum and villainy?"

Because at that point, the actual actions you would have to take to do that boil down to "plunder Greece." Only of course the Greeks deserved plundering, because they are wicked and you are the scourge of austere Calvinist free-market God come to punish them for their wickedness.

This is exactly like listening to Republicans talk about welfare recipients.

Now, I'm not saying the Greeks don't need to reform. They obviously DO. The problem is that extending them more and more loans while seeking to gain control over their economic assets because they have failed to "reform" is like giving an alcoholic more and more liquor while seeking to walk off with the family silver because they have failed to "sober up." The only sensible explanation for such behavior is either schizophrenia or the intent to rob someone.

If the problem were really "the Greeks need to reform," and that was really what mattered, the solution would be to forgive the debts (or the vast majority thereof), then NOT loan any more money to Greece for any reason for a period of a decade or two, and see if they can stay afloat on their own merits.

Nothing can possibly force a Greek reform more effectively than forcing them to live alone with the consequences of their decisions.

[Crown]

AAA - HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!! WAIT ... WAIT UNTIL YOU GET A LOAD OF THIS ... IT'S .. HAHAHAHA ... HILARIOUS!

IMF report says Greece will need much more debt relief than bailout offers

Fund’s involvement in bailout now in doubt as leaked debt sustainability report warns bank closures and capital controls have hugely damaged Greek economy

The severe damage caused to the Greek economy by more than two weeks of bank closures and capital controls means the stricken eurozone country will require far more generous debt relief than is currently on offer from its single-currency partners, according to the International Monetary Fund.

A report by the Washington-based Fund leaked to the news agency Reuters shows that Greece’s public debt is likely to peak at 200% of its national income within the next two years, with the risk that the actual outcome could be even worse.

The debt sustainability analysis comes on the eve of a crucial vote in Athens when the prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, will be seeking parliamentary approval for the fresh austerity measures demanded by the eurozone in return for a three-year rescue package worth up to €86bn (£61bn).

Putting into question its involvement in the bailout, the IMF report paints a far darker picture of Greece’s public finances than contained in the blueprint released at the end of the marathon eurozone leaders’ summit on Monday.

“The dramatic deterioration in debt sustainability points to the need for debt relief on a scale that would need to go well beyond what has been under consideration to date – and what has been proposed by the ESM,” the IMF said, referring to the European Stability Mechanism bailout fund which will be used to bankroll the Greek bailout plan.

Throughout the Greek crisis, the IMF has consistently urged deeper debt relief but has met resistance from European finance ministers, who have been unwilling to make their taxpayers pay the cost of a write-down.

Tsipras has also insisted that debt relief must form an important part of the package, but the Eurogroup statement on Monday said only that further measures might be taken provided Greece adhered in full to the reforms demanded by its creditors.

In the leaked report, the IMF says that Greece’s debts threaten to be unsustainable for decades, and that its financing needs will rise so that they are above the 15% of national income level deemed safe.

The IMF added that European creditors now face the choice of either annual transfers to the Greek budget or “deep upfront haircuts” (cancellation of part of the debt).

IMF sources confirmed that an updated debt sustainability analysis had been prepared by staff and would be discussed by the organisation’s executive board.

Unless the IMF can convince itself that Greece’s debts are sustainable, it would be forbidden by its own rules to put money into a new bailout. The assumption has been that the Fund would provide €16.4bn – around 25% of the total – with the rest coming from the ESM.

COMEDY GOLD PEOPLE!

[Crown]

So why not be upfront and be honest with 'give me all your shit' rather than 'deposit all your shit in tax haven Luxembourg under a shell organisation which I totally own'? Do one prat.

If "all the profits will either serve the debt of Greece or be invested into the Greek econmy as stimuli" is "give me all your shit", then you must be a very small mind indeed.

If you believe that line, I've got some magic beans to sell you Thanas.

Well a majority would happen to be European voters; do you live inside your bubble?

And these European voters can make their votes count in elections. Screaming how an offer made by democratically elected governments to another democratically elected government is a coup does not make you look rational, it just makes you look like a child who whines and screams because they didn't get their way.

A) it was Sophie's choice and B) are you implying that Democracies can't initiate coup d'etat? I never thought I'd live to see the day when you can out do your "Germany always pays her debts line", but congratulations, you just did! *golf clap*

It is not. FFS, it is almost like nobody ever reads the issues. Nobody who is whining about unsustainable debt has presumably read about the fact that the whole debt would be restructured under the QE program, thus turning it effectively into giant subsidies with any interest payyments being returned to Greece (and the creditors thus losing yearly money due to inflation).

Bzzt, wrong again Sam! Only the ECB interest payments would be returned in this manner, and good thing too since they were at 6%!

I think it is funny that people keep blaming Germany, even though this current plan is what the Greek government offered, and 'worse' than what had been demanded two weeks ago. And the ones arguing for being stricter with Greece are primarily the Eastern EU members who feel being robbed - Germany is actually a moderating force in the negotiations.

The fuck? Germany is the pack leader, and worse it's a country that 'claims' to know what it is doing and yet has repeatedly, consistently insists on goals that cannot be met and when they aren't they old 'they didn't try hard enough meme' gets trotted out.

Let me help you;

Code: Select all

Greek Economy        Greek Debt
     €237bn             €310bn

GDP Growth          Interest on Debt
     0.2%                   4%

DO YOU SEE A PROBLEM? You don't need a fucking degree to understand how it is IMPOSSIBLE for Greece to pay that back, and the solution? Give them €84bn more debt!

WHAT. THE. FUCK!

I'm losing my fucking mind, this is what it feels like to lose one's mind.

You can't lose what you never had in the first place.

Genuinely funny! *thumbs up*

The interest on Greek debt is not 4% of GDP either. It is 2.1% as has been pointed out before and will be even less in the future.

I'm going to ignore the highlighted (and I'm being generous here) inaccuracy with which you quoted my position and link you this; The WSJ kindly broke down all of the debt, the repayment schedule and where it could the interest payable.

I have no idea where you got the 2.1% claim, the best I could find is 2.6% from the source cited (excluding some 0.009% ones, which I think we can all agree are statistical outliers), but regardless, even if I concede to your point that the interest on the debt (as a whole) is 2.1%; you have yet to show how this can be achieved, given the economic realities.

And as a side note, what the data from the WSJ also should bring to focus is that there are many lenders, at different rates and importantly at fixed dates of payback. Which means that while we may model and talk about 'long payback structure' and 'low debt over all' there are still significant hurdles which have massive interest on them that if failed could be used to continue the now debunked myth (by Thanas himself ) that this is happening because the Greeks are >not<* doing enough austerity rather than the targets were never achievable anyway!

There was never any agenda other than complete and utter subjugation of Greece by the Europgroup irrespective of Tsipras or Varoufakis or SYRIZA's behaviour. To say otherwise is to basically admit that the current 'bailout' is more punitive than necessary just out of sheer spite.

Subjugate that insignificant little nation? For what purpose? For what gain? Strategic Gyros purposes?

I don't have to provide a reason why a dog licks his balls to validate the observation that it does Thanas.

Also, nice to know that subjugation translates into "half a trillion Euros".

Which went straight out of Greece and to the banks, we've danced this tune, you fucked off last time.


EDIT :: * added 'not' so it makes sense.

[Crown]

Jesus fucking christ, you're the type of dumb cunt who would be blaming Cassandra for Troy's destruction and not Paris if you think Varoufakis was the 'problem' in this!

Have you even followed the news in February, fucktard?

<snip some dumb cunt literally proving me right by continuing to blame Varoufakis a.k.a. Cassandra>

You're like a whoopy cushion; so easy to make you squeal a funny noise. So when I accused you of being "the type of dumb cunt who would be blaming Cassandra for Troy's destruction and not Paris", you don't seek to disprove my contention that Varoufakis is Cassandra in our scenario, you just start blaming Varoufakis!

Lets make something clear, I don't give a fuck if Varoufakis stood up in the middle of the Eurogroup, whipped his cock out and started dancing the Zorba. It does not change the fact that 1 + 1 = 2, and the Greek debt is unsustainable the way it is loaded right now.

What you just wrote was that the poor delicate souls are now punishing Greece more than is necessary just because they didn't like Varoufakis, and alarming enough, you thought this was a GOOD point for your argument. Do you even proof read what you write, or do you just subject us all to your mental diarrhoea without filter?

[salm]

It's the pro-Greek side using 'lazy' as a shorthand for a diverse array of criticisms that all summarize as "the reason the Greeks have problems is because they have this vice or that vice, and so the way to solve the problem is to treat them like they're children and spank* them until they behave better!"

There are probably at least a dozen versions of that argument, but they all reduce to "Greece suffers because of a lack of Greek virtue, and it is the role of the 'adult' European powers to take up the white man's burden help Greece acquire the virtues it needs." All these arguments are then used, in varying forms, to justify putting into motion a series of policies that avoid doing the things Greece needs, in favor of doing things that will benefit foreign creditors.

It is very much like the approach taken by the Republican Party in the US: private sector good, virtuous people always get rich, you're poor because you lack virtues, so we should not only not help you, we shouldn't even refrain from hurting you, because you lack virtue, you terrible person, you.
______________

*[And if, by any chance, you don't believe in spanking as a means of remedying child behavioral problems... consider why spanking a country is a better idea]

Well, what's your perceived problem with the pension system? Once we know that, the challenge is simply to make your objections fact-based, rather than using the sort of idiot moralizing about "welfare queens" the Republican Party in the US uses when it wants to get rid of a chunk of the American welfare system.

Well, maybe I´m talking to completely different people and read completely different newspapers but I have the impression that most of the times people and newspapers don´t complain about the Greeks themselves but the Greek government or outdated and bad social infra structure.
An example would be the pension system. If I google it in German Google the first news articles that pop up are about how the Greeks do not retire earlier than anyone else but how the Greek pension system is still bad. Not because Greeks are lazy but because besides being a pension system it also takes the function of a welfare system (which otherwise is not existant). It explains factually what else sucks about it and why it would be worse to cut the Greek than for example the German system.
That´s why i´m asking where this "lazy" thing comes from. From my perspective it looks like a complete straw man.

But of course I could be wrong. I don´t read tabloids, so perhaps that´s where a lot of that Greek bashing nonsense is comming from. Or from TV talk shows where politicans regularily trumpet their fecal matter to the masses.

However, it seems clear that there are a lot of predjudices and misunderstandings floating around and the age old problem of percieving a whole nation (be it Greece or Germany) as a homogenous block is causing massive problems and really toxic environments. It´s really frustrating, esspecially in the age of a supposedly united Europe.

[Thanas]

]If "all the profits will either serve the debt of Greece or be invested into the Greek econmy as stimuli" is "give me all your shit", then you must be a very small mind indeed.

As the Greek debt grows larger, it will become impossible for a fund which invests in the Greek economy and tracks its growth to grow fast enough to outrun the size of the debt. In which case a larger and larger share of the profits will end up "serving the debt of greece," which is to say "serving the creditors of Greece," at which point the creditors are doing rather well out of their control over the fund, since it's a steady little money-maker that pays them several billion euros a year more or less in perpetuity...

This just goes to show that you are fundamentally misinformed about the way the fond is setup and that you have not read the terms of the agreement. Bad form, Simon.
The stimuli is a set percentage according to the deal, it will remain the same.

When a set of democratically elected governments come up to a single government which they have a major advantage over, and coerce the single government into ignoring last week's referendum and agreeing to many of the same things it expressly didn't want...

It is called diplomacy and happens every time, even against Germany. Or why do you think Germany joined the Euro in the first place? It did because otherwise France would not have allowed reunification.

"Coup" is not the right word, perhaps. But we really don't have a word for "small government is forced to capitulate to a series of humiliating terms that turn it into a de facto puppet of foreign interests that no longer carries out the will of its electorate."

If you think this makes Greece a puppet you are not worth listening to either. A puppet does not get to have their parliaments debate the laws or get to propose alternative measures.

Such a word would be useful; "coup" is being used as a rather crude substitute.

No, it is used as a dishonest attempt to make it appear as if the creditors actions were defacto illegal and immoral.

I am attempting to explain why pro-Greeks summarize arguments like "Greeks shirk their responsibilities like paying taxes, and Greeks expect to retire at fifty, and Greeks don't work hard enough, and Greeks are reckless about debt, and so on..." with the much shorter, more compact "Greeks are lazy."

And I am explaining why it is wrong to do so and does nobody justice.

Bullshit. It will be slowed down until the obstacles are fixed. You can't just retract something that has already gone through.

That depends heavily on the precise wording of the agreement. I will confess that I've been relying on third party summaries of the agreement.

Then go and read it.

Suffice to say that the world already has a LOT of experience with the kind of treaties that nations like Britain, France, and Germany sign with heavily indebted nations they're planning to use as a cash cow.

Use Greece as a cash cow? Are you mad? Fucking hell. This would be like me claiming the USA intends to use Louisiana as a cash cow. The economy of Europe cannot use Greece as a Cash cow - even if it would be asset stripping everything the half-a-trillion bailout would be way higher than any asset sale. Why do we know this? Because the highest privatisations and selloffs were only supposed to reach 50-75bn EUR. I don't know about you, but spending close to 500bn to get at best 75 back is pretty stupid.

Much of that half trillion Euros was thrown into Greece by private banks- that decision was on par with a lot of bad lending that took place up to 2008. I can't say what Goldman Sachs and so on were thinking back in 2005.

Again, you are talking about different things here and confuse a part of the first bailout to the whole bailouts. Go on, pull up some numbers. Tell me how the bailout was worth whatever meagre assets Greece has. If the creditors want to asset strip Greece they would have done so already. But no, instead Greece gets another bailout - A bailout that is nearly double of what the asset sale is supposed to bring. You just don't know what the Greeks have that are actually worth it.

Would you mind linking to the post where you previously mentioned this? Or to the source where you heard about it? I'll even take a German language source; I can pick my way through some bits of written German and rely on translation software when I can't.

Just do a search for my username and the words interest percentage GDP, they should pop up.

Right- but bobalot's criticism is that the economic zone in its present state is a failure. You can argue that this failure was inevitable due to France and Ireland rejecting a political union... but it's still a failure.

Thing is, nobody agrees with that. The people of Europe certainly do not. The Greeks themselves do not. Whoever disagrees are mainly anglo-saxons or people with no stake in it.

He didn't say "the interest on Greek debt is 4% of GDP." He said "the interest rate on Greek debt is 4%." Are you sure you're correcting him on the right fact?

If Greek debts are somewhat between 180-200% of the GDP and interest is 4% as he claims then there is no way Greece only spends 2.1% 2.6% GDP on debt service. The number makes no sense.

If the half trillion Euros are a loan, then they are simply the mechanism by which creditors hope to eventually get back up to half a trillion Euros from Greece. More than that if they're lucky, less if (as is probably the case) the Greek economy collapses from exhaustion at trying to meet the demands of its creditors.

A loan is not a gift and it's disingenuous to call it one.

Again, you are unfamiliar with the terms of the loans. They are interest free with long maturities. That is nothing but a disguised gift.

This is exactly like listening to Republicans talk about welfare recipients.

It is not, because most Welfare recipients actually manage to do simple tasks like cleaning their house. The Greek Government is not even able to do a simple task like figuring out who owns what land.

FFS; they have promised to build a cadastre since 1996. They got EU money to do it. Now, only about 40% is done. Let that one sink in and then claim that this is anything remotely like republicans and welfare queens.

Now, I'm not saying the Greeks don't need to reform. They obviously DO. The problem is that extending them more and more loans while seeking to gain control over their economic assets because they have failed to "reform" is like giving an alcoholic more and more liquor while seeking to walk off with the family silver because they have failed to "sober up." The only sensible explanation for such behavior is either schizophrenia or the intent to rob someone.

The Greek pensioners need money now. The Greek homeless and jobless need money now. Without money now, Greece will starve. And you suggest to simply just stop the loans? Are you sure you are not the callous one?

Nothing can possibly force a Greek reform more effectively than forcing them to live alone with the consequences of their decisions.

Except they don't want that, the vast majority of Greeks wants to accept the deal. So now what? Just cut them lose and refuse them the aid?

[Thanas]

So why not be upfront and be honest with 'give me all your shit' rather than 'deposit all your shit in tax haven Luxembourg under a shell organisation which I totally own'? Do one prat.

If "all the profits will either serve the debt of Greece or be invested into the Greek econmy as stimuli" is "give me all your shit", then you must be a very small mind indeed.

If you believe that line, I've got some magic beans to sell you Thanas.

It is in the bailout deal. So what do you think will happen? That they'll just go "HAHAHAH CUNNING PLAN" and ignore that? Sorry, ignoring promises made seems to be the Greek specialty, not the European one.

A) it was Sophie's choice

It was not.

Bzzt, wrong again Sam! Only the ECB interest payments would be returned in this manner, and good thing too since they were at 6%!

Even if that were true, debt service still is 2.1% 2.6% of GDP right now. That is both sustainable and doable. Greece can easily accomplish that alone by slashing their military spending, which is above 4% of GDP. As long as this is not done then I really don't think claims like "unsustainable debt, now ignore my huge military" hold any merit.

I have no idea where you got the 2.1% claim, the best I could find is 2.6% from the source cited (excluding some 0.009% ones, which I think we can all agree are statistical outliers), but regardless, even if I concede to your point that the interest on the debt (as a whole) is 2.1%; you have yet to show how this can be achieved, given the economic realities.

Conceded, mixed the numbers up.

Still, 2.6% is still very doable considering the country sits on 4% military budget.

I don't have to provide a reason why a dog licks his balls to validate the observation that it does Thanas.

Actually, you do when it is an outrageous and outlandish claim. For example, if I claim that the US wants to gain Control of Cuba to enslave the Cuban populace, I should be expected to quote sources. So tell me, where does this "subjugation" claim come from?

Which went straight out of Greece and to the banks, we've danced this tune, you fucked off last time.

Again harping on the first bailout and ignoring the current bailout, good form.

[Thanas]

Now, Tsipras is currently on TV: (via Guardian)

On the issue of Grexit, Tsipras says Greece simply isn’t in a position to handle a return to the drachma. Not only would the banks collapse, but it would cause ‘huge problems’ elsewhere.
Tsipras: Country does not have sufficient currency reserves to return to a national currency
Tsipras deal was the only one possible. "I went to Russia China and U.S. and there were no other options."
"Prior actions didn't change after referendum. Must be honest about that. But we have longer funding period & debt relief"

He says that Greece “fought a battle” to protect wages and pensions from cuts. And he suggests Greece can exit the crisis in three years.
"We got a lower primary budget surplus requirement. "
Tsipras on increasing retirement age to 67: "We should have done it ourselves. It's not progressive to allow people retire early."

We ended up with a tough agreement, but at least it’s not the dead end we faced earlier.

Also:

Kapa Research poll for To Vima Should Parliament approve the Brussels agreement? Yes 70.1% No 25.3%

Impressive, candid interview. Maybe there is some hope for Greece yet.

[Edi]

AAA - HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!! WAIT ... WAIT UNTIL YOU GET A LOAD OF THIS ... IT'S .. HAHAHAHA ... HILARIOUS!

<snip>

COMEDY GOLD PEOPLE!

Yeah, you're absolutely right. That's some real comedy gold there, with Tsipras and Varoufakis having forced things to this point to drive their country even deeper into the hole, so that everyone (the Greek people, the eurozone, all of Greece's creditors and possibly anyone else who gets affected by further turmoil caused by this down the road) gets to suffer even more bad consequences.

They were offered a way not to have to do the bank closures and financial controls and they deliberately drove off the fucking cliff and then came back tails between their legs to accept essentially the same or worse AFTER they had caused the additional damage. And this is somehow all Germany's fault?

[Crown]

If you believe that line, I've got some magic beans to sell you Thanas.

It is in the bailout deal. So what do you think will happen? That they'll just go "HAHAHAH CUNNING PLAN" and ignore that? Sorry, ignoring promises made seems to be the Greek specialty, not the European one.

I'm sure it is in the bailout deal, I'm also just as sure the bailout deal is unworkable. They might as well say we'll give you a free lollipop when you flap your arms and fly.

A) it was Sophie's choice

It was not.

Yes it was, I win!

Bzzt, wrong again Sam! Only the ECB interest payments would be returned in this manner, and good thing too since they were at 6%!

Even if that were true, debt service still is 2.1% 2.6% of GDP right now. That is both sustainable and doable. Greece can easily accomplish that alone by slashing their military spending, which is above 4% of GDP. As long as this is not done then I really don't think claims like "unsustainable debt, now ignore my huge military" hold any merit.

Show your working; or concede.

I have no idea where you got the 2.1% claim, the best I could find is 2.6% from the source cited (excluding some 0.009% ones, which I think we can all agree are statistical outliers), but regardless, even if I concede to your point that the interest on the debt (as a whole) is 2.1%; you have yet to show how this can be achieved, given the economic realities.

Conceded, mixed the numbers up.

Still, 2.6% is still very doable considering the country sits on 4% military budget.

Oh my god... Did you look at the payment schedule? This 2.6% blended interest rate that we have agreed for our discussions assumes a steady pay back of all the loans, but that's not reality. The loans immediately due are to the IMF and ECB (which are 6%), and these will not be met. The IMF just admitted as much (again), because the economy is depressed.

And demanding a country that is on the periphery of South East Europe at the junctions of Asia and Africa and is receiving more migrants across its boarders than Italy now to cut military spending is asinine. And this coming from an obvious lefty who has no love for it!

I don't have to provide a reason why a dog licks his balls to validate the observation that it does Thanas.

Actually, you do when it is an outrageous and outlandish claim. For example, if I claim that the US wants to gain Control of Cuba to enslave the Cuban populace, I should be expected to quote sources. So tell me, where does this "subjugation" claim come from?

Your kidding right? Did you read the leaks that The Guardian were posting on their live feed during the bailout talks? Fuck the Slovak president tweeted about it, until he realised he was fucking up and deleted the tweet;



How about this interview with Varoufakis where he claims;

Varoufakis said that Schäuble, Germany’s finance minister and the architect of the deals Greece signed in 2010 and 2012, was “consistent throughout”. “His view was ‘I’m not discussing the programme – this was accepted by the previous [Greek] government and we can’t possibly allow an election to change anything.

“So at that point I said ‘Well perhaps we should simply not hold elections anymore for indebted countries’, and there was no answer. The only interpretation I can give [of their view] is, ‘Yes, that would be a good idea, but it would be difficult. So you either sign on the dotted line or you are out.’”

I understand that thought but when you are dealing with 2 bailout packages which have been un-mitigated failures, it takes a special kind of hubris to refuse to look at alternatives.

But wait, Varoufakis is a liar isn't he? Well how about Timmy Geithner;

A few days later [i.e., late July 2012], I flew to meet Wolfgang Schäuble for lunch during his vacation at a resort in Sylt, a North Sea island known as Germany’s Martha’s Vineyard. Schäuble was engaging, but I left Sylt feeling more worried than ever.
He told me there were many in Europe who still thought kicking the Greeks out of the eurozone was a plausible — even desirable — strategy.
The idea was that with Greece out, Germany would be more likely to provide the financial support the eurozone needed because the German people would no longer perceive aid to Europe as a bailout for the Greeks. At the same time, a Grexit would be traumatic enough that it would help scare the rest of Europe into giving up more sovereignty to a stronger banking and fiscal union. The argument was that letting Greece burn would make it easier to build a stronger Europe with a more credible firewall.

Which went straight out of Greece and to the banks, we've danced this tune, you fucked off last time.

Again harping on the first bailout and ignoring the current bailout, good form.

YOU said "half a trillion Euros", does that, or does that not include the first bailout?

[salm]

I know fuck all about national economies and their mechanisms but I was wondering why there were such fundamental differences between German (and a couple of other) financial politics and other financial politics propagated for example here or by reputable economist (e.g. Krugman).

After researching for a while I found that the Krugmans are suggesting to solve the crisis in a Keynesian way wheras the Schäubles trie to solve it in an ordoliberal way suggested by Walter Eucken.

Would this explain the large divide between the different parties better than stupidity, malignity, greed and incompetence?

[Simon_Jester]

Not ignoring you, Thanas, just in a poor position to finish an honest and not off-the-cuff reply to you for (probably) a few hours.

Well, maybe I´m talking to completely different people and read completely different newspapers but I have the impression that most of the times people and newspapers don´t complain about the Greeks themselves but the Greek government or outdated and bad social infra structure.

An example would be the pension system. If I google it in German Google the first news articles that pop up are about how the Greeks do not retire earlier than anyone else but how the Greek pension system is still bad. Not because Greeks are lazy but because besides being a pension system it also takes the function of a welfare system (which otherwise is not existant). It explains factually what else sucks about it and why it would be worse to cut the Greek than for example the German system.
That´s why i´m asking where this "lazy" thing comes from. From my perspective it looks like a complete straw man.

Reread this thread and make a mark on a piece of paper every time someone alludes to the need to 'punish' the Greeks or implies that the Greeks are uniquely corrupt, incompetent, or otherwise inferior and lacking basic virtues.

I am honestly not sure how many marks will be on your paper, but I'm betting it's at least up into the double digits.

And this is from educated people who believe they understand finance and are normally opposed to discrimination, stereotyping, and the like!

It is certainly true that there are many valid criticisms of Greek government and economic organization. But if we're going to deal with this issue rationally we HAVE to be prepared to set aside prejudices, make an intellectually honest decision about what our goal is, and how to pursue that goal. If we can't do that, there's no point in even trying to think about what to do with regards to Greece. All answers that are based on the assumption of "punish the wicked spendthrift welfare queens!" are doomed to failure, just as the 1980s and 1990s-era 'reforms' of the American welfare system have failed to bring an end to poverty.

Meanwhile, at the moment, many Greeks have considerable reason to think that their nation is being punished because a bunch of foreigners have decided they are 'lazy' or 'disrespectful' or some other nationalist/racist stereotype.

So when they hear something that sounds like the same old stereotyping, especially if it's being used as a tool to avoid real discussion of issues like "is it financially possible for Greece to repay this debt at all," they start dismissing it as more biased lazy-Greeks reasoning by people who aren't trying to fix anything and just want to avenge themselves on Greece for perceived slights.

I don't blame them.

However, it seems clear that there are a lot of predjudices and misunderstandings floating around and the age old problem of percieving a whole nation (be it Greece or Germany) as a homogenous block is causing massive problems and really toxic environments. It´s really frustrating, esspecially in the age of a supposedly united Europe.

It is arguably the single greatest obstacle to having a united Europe. Instead of closing ranks, everyone jumps back into the old nationalist reflexes of condemning the states that one sees as causing a problem. And of attributing the entire problem to their actions, and then demanding impractical solutions because the impractical solutions allow stakeholders to pretend they don't have to do anything to make the problem go away.

[Crown]

AAA - HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!! WAIT ... WAIT UNTIL YOU GET A LOAD OF THIS ... IT'S .. HAHAHAHA ... HILARIOUS!

<snip>

COMEDY GOLD PEOPLE!

Yeah, you're absolutely right. That's some real comedy gold there, with Tsipras and Varoufakis having forced things to this point to drive their country even deeper into the hole, so that everyone (the Greek people, the eurozone, all of Greece's creditors and possibly anyone else who gets affected by further turmoil caused by this down the road) gets to suffer even more bad consequences.

They were offered a way not to have to do the bank closures and financial controls and they deliberately drove off the fucking cliff and then came back tails between their legs to accept essentially the same or worse AFTER they had caused the additional damage. And this is somehow all Germany's fault?

Here's a fucking timeline;

• Late June Tsipras offered a take it or leave it deal with no debt restructuring
• Tsipras calls for plebiscite
• Juker has a melt down on TV where he claims they weren't going after the pensions (lie) and Tsipras left 'just before the good bit' where they were going to discuss a debt restructuring
• Leaks appear in the press first Reuters and then The Guardian that there is an internal memo from the IMF that Greece's debt is unsustainable and that without a 10 year grace period and €50bn debt forgiveness no new deal will make a difference
• Eurogroup denies this
• IMF officially releases the internal memo showing Eurogroup kept this from Greece during the negotiations
• Capital controls put on Greek banks by ECB not acting like a central bank and thus being a lender of last resort
• Tsipras wins plebiscite and tries to negotiate a new deal, basically everything that was on the table in late June plus debt write down/restructuring
• Marathon bailout talks where Greece is forced to bend the knee, where it is important to note: Greece didn't want IMF to be part of the new bailout but was overruled by the Eurogroup
• Now IMF doubles down on previous statement and concedes the amount of debt forgiveness is greater than it first thought

And this, is Greece's fault? WHO KEPT THE IMF REPORT A SECRET Edi?

[Crown]

Would this explain the large divide between the different parties better than stupidity, malignity, greed and incompetence?

No. Because there are too many leaks and too many examples of this going beyond economic ideologies to down right nastiness on the part of the powers that be.

Just look at the wanton amnesia people display about the timeline of these things, it's astounding.

[Edi]

Crown, conceded on the IMF memo issue. I have to admit that I have not followed the Greek debt crisis very closely for all the twists and turns, so this is an error on my part. And if it was that way, then no wonder.

Note that I am not opposed to debt relief if and when it is necessary, but with how glacially things have proceeded with regard all of the important reform issues I have enumerated before, I would oppose any additional help beyond strictly humanitarian help until there is real, measurable advancement on those.

In my country there are is a fairly big supermajority that opposes any debt relief (some 74% IIRC, with only 14% in favor) and would insist on the original agreements. Likewise, 73% of Finns think the current crisis is mainly the fault of the Greek government (past governments and this one) and only 5% think it's mainly the fault of the EU, ECB and IMF. The number of people who think the blame is equal on both sides is 17%.

As for Greece staying in the eurozone, 45% of Finns favor kicking them out, 30% favor keeping them in and 25% are undecided.

So it is safe to say that the majority of my country's voters are in the camp of "Kick them out, wash our hands of them and watch them burn". I guess part of it is that Finland paid all of its debts (fairly imposed or not) after both world wars (IIRC the only country to have done so) and our culture also places great emphasis on contracts being something that are supposed to be kept, come hell or high water. The whole situation, the time it has taken and especially the behavior of Tsipras and Varoufakis have been major factors in driving things in this direction. I'm one of the moderates compared to most of my countrymen.

It's also the reason why Finland has been so hawkish on the topic. The numbers in Germany for those same things go along a 59/9/23 (blame Greece/Troika/both) and 47/37/16 (Grexit/stay/undecided) split, which means that especially in terms of the blame question, we are a lot less forgiving. The numbers come from the July 6th-10th poll conducted in six different countries (Finland, France, Germany, Sweden, UK and Denmark).

[Vendetta]

In my country there are is a fairly big supermajority that opposes any debt relief (some 74% IIRC, with only 14% in favor) and would insist on the original agreements. Likewise, 73% of Finns think the current crisis is mainly the fault of the Greek government (past governments and this one) and only 5% think it's mainly the fault of the EU, ECB and IMF. The number of people who think the blame is equal on both sides is 17%.

That's because admitting the real underlying causes (the structure of the Euro and how it restricts monetary policy in member nations) would mean admitting how fucked Finland is.

Finland has lost 10% of its GDP in the last decade and there's no credible route towards recovery because devaluation can't occur within the Euro and so logging exports can't return to a competitive state.

But y'know, blame the Greeks, it's easier than looking at the shaky ground your own economy stands on.

[Crown]

Crown, conceded on the IMF memo issue. I have to admit that I have not followed the Greek debt crisis very closely for all the twists and turns, so this is an error on my part. And if it was that way, then no wonder.

Note that I am not opposed to debt relief if and when it is necessary, but with how glacially things have proceeded with regard all of the important reform issues I have enumerated before, I would oppose any additional help beyond strictly humanitarian help until there is real, measurable advancement on those.

This is my question; why? If you take out the draconian and unsustainable debt replacements as they are today Greece is running a budget surplus, which means it's living within its means. So why are you hung up about all these reforms you've listed? Because aside for the fire sale of Greek assets that's about to happen and the war on the pensioners, I'm not opposed to any obvious reform measure, but I don't think it is a reason to stop a proper negotiation either.

In my country there are is a fairly big supermajority that opposes any debt relief (some 74% IIRC, with only 14% in favor) and would insist on the original agreements. Likewise, 73% of Finns think the current crisis is mainly the fault of the Greek government (past governments and this one) and only 5% think it's mainly the fault of the EU, ECB and IMF. The number of people who think the blame is equal on both sides is 17%.

As for Greece staying in the eurozone, 45% of Finns favor kicking them out, 30% favor keeping them in and 25% are undecided.

So it is safe to say that the majority of my country's voters are in the camp of "Kick them out, wash our hands of them and watch them burn". I guess part of it is that Finland paid all of its debts (fairly imposed or not) after both world wars (IIRC the only country to have done so) and our culture also places great emphasis on contracts being something that are supposed to be kept, come hell or high water. The whole situation, the time it has taken and especially the behavior of Tsipras and Varoufakis have been major factors in driving things in this direction. I'm one of the moderates compared to most of my countrymen.

It's also the reason why Finland has been so hawkish on the topic. The numbers in Germany for those same things go along a 59/9/23 (blame Greece/Troika/both) and 47/37/16 (Grexit/stay/undecided) split, which means that especially in terms of the blame question, we are a lot less forgiving. The numbers come from the July 6th-10th poll conducted in six different countries (Finland, France, Germany, Sweden, UK and Denmark).

Look, I get why the average Finn, German, Latvian etc would be taking a dim view on these things; the narrative that they've been sold is the 'lazy Greek meme' which you yourself have repeated inadvertently when you list all the reforms Greece hasn't done; what they've never been told is that it's a smokescreen; Greece will find its self in a perpetual state of default and pauper the way the loans are set up right now, because as I've mentioned above it's not a 'nice and steady' 2.6%, it is a variety of loans to a variety of lenders with a variety of interest rates that have hard due dates.

What Varoufakis was asking for was for the IMF to be repaid and asked to leave, for all the debt owned by the ECB (€26bn) to be transferred to the ESFS/ESM - which can be done as a clerical exercise - which would reduce the interest rate from 6% to 2.6% and that the debt owed to other European governments also be payed back by the ESFS/ESM so they don't get out pocket and of course then the ESFS/ESM becomes the primary creditor to Greece where you have the lowest interest rates, at regular intervals with a smooth, consistent repayment schedule.

He was told no.

So instead, we have 'a bailout' loading Greece with €85bn more debt.... Great. That will help things...

[His Divine Shadow]

In my country there are is a fairly big supermajority that opposes any debt relief (some 74% IIRC, with only 14% in favor) and would insist on the original agreements. Likewise, 73% of Finns think the current crisis is mainly the fault of the Greek government (past governments and this one) and only 5% think it's mainly the fault of the EU, ECB and IMF. The number of people who think the blame is equal on both sides is 17%.

That's because admitting the real underlying causes (the structure of the Euro and how it restricts monetary policy in member nations) would mean admitting how fucked Finland is.

Finland has lost 10% of its GDP in the last decade and there's no credible route towards recovery because devaluation can't occur within the Euro and so logging exports can't return to a competitive state.

But y'know, blame the Greeks, it's easier than looking at the shaky ground your own economy stands on.

Yeah we're dun fucked good thanks to the euro. We're desperately trying austerity despite it's sterling successes in the past, but nobody wants to get hit and nobody has the balls to really start making cuts either so we're just treading water.

Wanting to remain in the euro is like wanting to keep having cancer so you won't lose out on that sweet chemotherapy.

[bobalot]

It's hilarious that many of the Euro sceptic claims that were dismissed as complete fantasies have now been shown to be completely true.
* Loss of national sovereignty
* An economic straight jacket that will shrink or stagnate their economies (see Finland, Denmark, Greece, Italy, etc)
* Bullying of large countries of small countries via EU institutions
* Even the outlandish claims like looting of national assets by foreigners (and yes, when Greece fails to comply with the impossible demands of Germany, those $50 billion of cherry picked public assets will be looted)
Germany has just signed the death note of the EU.

[Crown]

That's because admitting the real underlying causes (the structure of the Euro and how it restricts monetary policy in member nations) would mean admitting how fucked Finland is.

Finland has lost 10% of its GDP in the last decade and there's no credible route towards recovery because devaluation can't occur within the Euro and so logging exports can't return to a competitive state.

But y'know, blame the Greeks, it's easier than looking at the shaky ground your own economy stands on.

Yeah we're dun fucked good thanks to the euro. We're desperately trying austerity despite it's sterling successes in the past, but nobody wants to get hit and nobody has the balls to really start making cuts either so we're just treading water.

Wanting to remain in the euro is like wanting to keep having cancer so you won't lose out on that sweet chemotherapy.

Hey look! Finns and Greeks are more alike then we knew!

(sorry, easy joke)

P.S. In other posts I keep writing ESFS when it should be EFSF!!!!

[Edi]

In my country there are is a fairly big supermajority that opposes any debt relief (some 74% IIRC, with only 14% in favor) and would insist on the original agreements. Likewise, 73% of Finns think the current crisis is mainly the fault of the Greek government (past governments and this one) and only 5% think it's mainly the fault of the EU, ECB and IMF. The number of people who think the blame is equal on both sides is 17%.

That's because admitting the real underlying causes (the structure of the Euro and how it restricts monetary policy in member nations) would mean admitting how fucked Finland is.

Finland has lost 10% of its GDP in the last decade and there's no credible route towards recovery because devaluation can't occur within the Euro and so logging exports can't return to a competitive state.

But y'know, blame the Greeks, it's easier than looking at the shaky ground your own economy stands on.

Hardly the only reason. We have some massive fucking structural problems of our own that have nothing to do with the euro and which would have come home to roost sooner or later anyway. Systemic problems in how things have been set up as a fucking quilt where patches have been added on top of patches on top of yet more patches. It's not as if they have exactly been a surprise, this shit has been known for 15+ years, but our governments, which prior to the current one have been horrible six-party Frankenstein monsters where in order to get anything done you couldn't touch one hair on anybody's sacred cows. So when the economy was doing better and it would have been easier to fix things that were not in a seriously bad state, it wasn't done. And now that we're finding that which we left behind ahead of us, it's a fucking lot less fun and entails more suffering.

A big part of the problem is the fucking bureaucratic idiocy in implementing absolutely anything. Also, we have a fairly robust municipal autonomy written into the constitution, so every single fucking unviable net population loss municipality is expected to run everything by itself and most entitlements have been foisted off to be municipal responsibility rather than the central government's. This has led to things like every single backwater having its own systems for everything, most of which is incompatible with everything else everywhere else.

Estonia designed, implemented and put into production a nation-wide healthcare system for something like 12 million euros. They implemented a smart and functional national ID system that can be used for a lot of things for similar peanuts. For comparison we're looking at a cost of hundreds of millions for the IT system of a single fucking hospital organization in the Helsinki area.

These sort of stupidities, bureaucratic overlaps and ossified governing structures aren't exactly helping any when you need to start looking at things from a "How do I improve and fix this?" point of view. Especially when you aren't allowed to touch anybody's sacred cows.

It's definitely not just the euro and monetary policy that are the problems. It'll be interesting to see if we have a thread like this about Finland a few years hence.

Crown, conceded on the IMF memo issue. I have to admit that I have not followed the Greek debt crisis very closely for all the twists and turns, so this is an error on my part. And if it was that way, then no wonder.

Note that I am not opposed to debt relief if and when it is necessary, but with how glacially things have proceeded with regard all of the important reform issues I have enumerated before, I would oppose any additional help beyond strictly humanitarian help until there is real, measurable advancement on those.

This is my question; why? If you take out the draconian and unsustainable debt replacements as they are today Greece is running a budget surplus, which means it's living within its means. So why are you hung up about all these reforms you've listed? Because aside for the fire sale of Greek assets that's about to happen and the war on the pensioners, I'm not opposed to any obvious reform measure, but I don't think it is a reason to stop a proper negotiation either.

The problem so far is that nothing has been done despite those reforms being part of the package even in the first bailout. I don't oppose continuing negotiations, and like I said I don't even oppose some degree of debt relief, but without seeing those needed structural reforms in return, it'll have been a few hundred billion down the fucking drain and no reason to expect any change in the future. If the reforms happen, then that may perhaps allow some kind of buffer or protection against certain problems in the future.

It's gotten to the point with that where Greek words mean nothing and only actions count. If the words match actions, then they can be taken seriously. If they do not, they should be ignored.

[Crown]

Holy shit the IMF just told the Eurogroup that they're out;



Debt relief or we walk. WOW.

[Vendetta]

A big part of the problem is the fucking bureaucratic idiocy in implementing absolutely anything. Also, we have a fairly robust municipal autonomy written into the constitution, so every single fucking unviable net population loss municipality is expected to run everything by itself and most entitlements have been foisted off to be municipal responsibility rather than the central government's. This has led to things like every single backwater having its own systems for everything, most of which is incompatible with everything else everywhere else.

But none of those things are going to make your export industries competitive again, because in the last decade Nokia went from one of the global leaders in the mobile market to making weird shit nobody wants (windows phones) and the other principal export, the logging industry, can't compete on cost with countries with much lower labour costs.

If Finland was still on the Markka then devaluation and quantitative easing would allow costs to decline and restore some of that competitiveness, allowing Finland to sell things internationally and increasing GDP again relatively quickly. (this also offsets the impact of austerity policies, as it did in Canada in the '90s)

But Finland isn't on the Markka, it's on the Euro, so it can't do anything with monetary policy to stimulate its economy, only a long grinding period of wage deflation accompanied by continual decline in GDP which is wholly reliant on external factors in order to return to competitiveness.

You can make all the "structural reforms" you like, won't make a blind bit of difference without an unfucked export economy to rebuild GDP.

Same as Greece isn't on the Drachma, so it can't devalue and attract cheap tourism from relatively stronger currency areas, especially now they've had to increase VAT on the islands, which are a significant part of the tourist draw making their economy even less competitive (tourism contributes around 18% of Greece's GDP, increasing VAT and therefore prices in the majority tourist destinations will make Greece more expensive as a destination and therefore less attractive to tourists).

[Vendetta]

Holy shit the IMF just told the Eurogroup that they're out;

Debt relief or we walk. WOW.

The IMF is prohibitied by its constitution to engage with what it considers unsustainable debts. They are literally not permitted by their own rules to go with the current eurozone offer.

[Crown]

Holy shit the IMF just told the Eurogroup that they're out;

Debt relief or we walk. WOW.

The IMF is prohibitied by its constitution to engage with what it considers unsustainable debts. They are literally not permitted by their own rules to go with the current eurozone offer.

Rumours are now circulating that the IMF informed the Eurogroup about this prior to last weekend's negotiations, but the Eurogroup didn't bring that up.

Remember, it's about 'trust' and 'confidence' and the Greeks have squandered a lot of it.