4 ms·

Its amazingly simple how entire countries can be taken over like this... Step 1. Bring foreign banks into country and proceed to make loans that are known obvi

Its amazingly simple how entire countries can be taken over like this... Step 1. Bring foreign banks into country and proceed to make loans that are known obviously to be non-repayable. No one says "no" to free money. Step 2. Keep doing this until a debt crisis is reached. Step 3. Have the bank-and-currency related foreign country and/or entity create a "bailout" package that fixes the foreigner bank ledgers. It does nothing else, there is no relief except to the foreign banks. Step 4. You now own that country, its resources, and all the people in it. You just bought it.

bpodgursky 11y ago
Greece is a free country and free to default. They weighed the tradeoffs and decided it would end poorly, and a (so-called) "humiliating" deal was better than Euro exit. Nobody is threatening Greece with military action should they not pay their debts. The fact is, they got a free ride for a couple decades on free money. They can take it and set out on their own, or pay lip-service to those debts (realistically, it's not going to get paid back fully in any outcome). It is a sovereign nation and can choose what deals to make, without your help.
- danharaj 11y ago
  Greece is a country with large government problems. And the government is not what pays the price for this structured deal. The people do. It is very convenient to assert that Greece is a free country where the people are in charge. If you want to blame someone for their misfortune, interpret past events so that it looks like they inflicted it on themselves. > Nobody is threatening Greece with military action should they not pay their debts. It should be quite obvious in 2015 that military action is not the only way nations can destroy other nations. For example, forcing them via a corrupt and disconnected government to pay into an unsustainable financial settlement until they are bled dry and peeled down to the bone is one way you can destroy a country. Why do we equivocate governments, states, and countries? The country of Greece suffers for the sins of its state, executed by its corrupt and inept government.
  - hnal943 11y ago
    Does Greece not have elections? How can you separate the people from the government that they elect?
kjksf 11y ago
I don't see what is simple about this plan. It takes a highly irresponsible government to borrow "obviously non-repayable" amounts of money for decades. Greece behaved like a heroin user and you're putting the blame on rehab clinic. I also don't see what exactly you mean by "You now own that country, its resources, and all the people in it". Minus hyperbole, who owns what exactly? If you read the terms of the bailout, it consists of prosaic reforms like allowing shops to be opened on Sundays, eliminate rampant tax avoidance, rise retirement age to merely match other Euro countries, stop hiring government employees if you don't have the money to pay them. And at the end of the day, the only way to enforce that Greece does those reforms is to stop giving Greece even more money. Greece promised and failed to deliver before. Those are things that Greek government should have done long time ago except they didn't, got in huge debt and now some people think that it's the lender's fault.
- RodericDay 11y ago
  Do you have any examples were you actually think that the lender is at fault and deserves punishment, while the borrower deserves a break?
- powertower 11y ago
  > Greece behaved like a heroin user and you're putting the blame on rehab clinic. No. I'm putting the blame on the heroin supplier.
- danharaj 11y ago
  Greece should have been allowed to default. That's why lenders make money. Because there is a risk of default. Bailing out an irresponsible lender to turn the problem from simple finance to geopolitics is not how you solve insolvency. That is how you use insolvency as an excuse to undermine sovereignty. > Those are things that Greek government should have done long time ago except they didn't, got in huge debt and now some people think that it's the lender's fault. It's not the Greek people's fault either. Also, again, when a debtor cannot pay, they default. They do not suffer arbitrarily at the whims of nations and supranational institutions because it's been literally centuries since anyone thought that bankruptcy meant that your autonomy and ability to go on with life was forfeit. Greece's economy collapsed by 25%. The people who structured the deal predicted it would shrink less than 5%. Greece 'fails to deliver'; the people who keep trying to collect on worthless debt fail to be reasonable or realistic. The people who suffer are people who did not make the deals. People have died because of austerity in Greece. For what? Your insipidly vindictive morality? > Minus hyperbole, who owns what exactly? > Greece behaved like a heroin user and you're putting the blame on rehab clinic. Presented without comment.
brc 11y ago
Not really. All you do is have a claim over a chunk of the future earnings of that country. All this could have been avoided many times, if the Greek government had stopped expanding its government and welfare programs. People sounded the alarms back in the 1980s when the expansion of the state was first begun in earnest. Really, it betrays a fundamental principle that voters will knowingly keep returning government with no intention of handing down a balanced budget, if they think they can get away with it. It's rational behaviour to vote yourself largesse if you think someone else will get stuck with the bill.
- _delirium 11y ago
  Greece has a lot of problems, but I don't think it was specifically expanding welfare systems, at least as I understand the term welfare (programs aimed at the poorest segments of society). Health coverage isn't universal and excludes the long-term unemployed; there is no income-support or cash welfare-payment system for the poor; no public housing at all, no rent-assistance program, etc. Even post-Hartz4 Germany has a more generous welfare system, never mind the more social-democratic countries. Without mentioning what a country like Denmark provides, we can look at the U.S., not usually thought of as the most generous welfare state, which has programs like Medicaid, food stamps, EITC, TANF, and Section 8 that Greece lacks any analog to. Greece does have quite a lot of middle-class and upper-middle-class entitlements, like good benefits for government employees, extremely generous employment terms for doctors, fairly good unemployment insurance for the temporarily unemployed, early retirement for professionals, etc. These tend to support people who already have more money, though. A possible exception is that the pensions in some cases act as a de facto welfare system, because pensioners are expected to support their unemployed kids, so in the case of poor households, one pension supports a meagre lifestyle for 3-4 people. So as long as you have at least one pensioner in your household, there is some minimum level of guaranteed income. If you don't, say that you're a long-term-unemployed 40-year-old who doesn't have family support, then you're pretty much screwed. At best you may try to get some support from the church, which runs soup kitchens and such. And of course it has a big tax-evasion and corruption problem, also largely among the better-off segments of society, which causes problems on the revenue end.
No1 11y ago
You may be interested in the book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, which recounts some stories of how the process was carried out by the author.

bpodgursky 11y ago

Greece is a free country and free to default. They weighed the tradeoffs and decided it would end poorly, and a (so-called) "humiliating" deal was better than Euro exit. Nobody is threatening Greece with military action should they not pay their debts. The fact is, they got a free ride for a couple decades on free money. They can take it and set out on their own, or pay lip-service to those debts (realistically, it's not going to get paid back fully in any outcome). It is a sovereign nation and can choose what deals to make, without your help.

danharaj 11y ago
Greece is a country with large government problems. And the government is not what pays the price for this structured deal. The people do. It is very convenient to assert that Greece is a free country where the people are in charge. If you want to blame someone for their misfortune, interpret past events so that it looks like they inflicted it on themselves. > Nobody is threatening Greece with military action should they not pay their debts. It should be quite obvious in 2015 that military action is not the only way nations can destroy other nations. For example, forcing them via a corrupt and disconnected government to pay into an unsustainable financial settlement until they are bled dry and peeled down to the bone is one way you can destroy a country. Why do we equivocate governments, states, and countries? The country of Greece suffers for the sins of its state, executed by its corrupt and inept government.
- hnal943 11y ago
  Does Greece not have elections? How can you separate the people from the government that they elect?

kjksf 11y ago

I don't see what is simple about this plan. It takes a highly irresponsible government to borrow "obviously non-repayable" amounts of money for decades. Greece behaved like a heroin user and you're putting the blame on rehab clinic. I also don't see what exactly you mean by "You now own that country, its resources, and all the people in it". Minus hyperbole, who owns what exactly? If you read the terms of the bailout, it consists of prosaic reforms like allowing shops to be opened on Sundays, eliminate rampant tax avoidance, rise retirement age to merely match other Euro countries, stop hiring government employees if you don't have the money to pay them. And at the end of the day, the only way to enforce that Greece does those reforms is to stop giving Greece even more money. Greece promised and failed to deliver before. Those are things that Greek government should have done long time ago except they didn't, got in huge debt and now some people think that it's the lender's fault.

RodericDay 11y ago
Do you have any examples were you actually think that the lender is at fault and deserves punishment, while the borrower deserves a break?
powertower 11y ago
> Greece behaved like a heroin user and you're putting the blame on rehab clinic. No. I'm putting the blame on the heroin supplier.
danharaj 11y ago
Greece should have been allowed to default. That's why lenders make money. Because there is a risk of default. Bailing out an irresponsible lender to turn the problem from simple finance to geopolitics is not how you solve insolvency. That is how you use insolvency as an excuse to undermine sovereignty. > Those are things that Greek government should have done long time ago except they didn't, got in huge debt and now some people think that it's the lender's fault. It's not the Greek people's fault either. Also, again, when a debtor cannot pay, they default. They do not suffer arbitrarily at the whims of nations and supranational institutions because it's been literally centuries since anyone thought that bankruptcy meant that your autonomy and ability to go on with life was forfeit. Greece's economy collapsed by 25%. The people who structured the deal predicted it would shrink less than 5%. Greece 'fails to deliver'; the people who keep trying to collect on worthless debt fail to be reasonable or realistic. The people who suffer are people who did not make the deals. People have died because of austerity in Greece. For what? Your insipidly vindictive morality? > Minus hyperbole, who owns what exactly? > Greece behaved like a heroin user and you're putting the blame on rehab clinic. Presented without comment.

brc 11y ago

Not really. All you do is have a claim over a chunk of the future earnings of that country. All this could have been avoided many times, if the Greek government had stopped expanding its government and welfare programs. People sounded the alarms back in the 1980s when the expansion of the state was first begun in earnest. Really, it betrays a fundamental principle that voters will knowingly keep returning government with no intention of handing down a balanced budget, if they think they can get away with it. It's rational behaviour to vote yourself largesse if you think someone else will get stuck with the bill.

_delirium 11y ago
Greece has a lot of problems, but I don't think it was specifically expanding welfare systems, at least as I understand the term welfare (programs aimed at the poorest segments of society). Health coverage isn't universal and excludes the long-term unemployed; there is no income-support or cash welfare-payment system for the poor; no public housing at all, no rent-assistance program, etc. Even post-Hartz4 Germany has a more generous welfare system, never mind the more social-democratic countries. Without mentioning what a country like Denmark provides, we can look at the U.S., not usually thought of as the most generous welfare state, which has programs like Medicaid, food stamps, EITC, TANF, and Section 8 that Greece lacks any analog to. Greece does have quite a lot of middle-class and upper-middle-class entitlements, like good benefits for government employees, extremely generous employment terms for doctors, fairly good unemployment insurance for the temporarily unemployed, early retirement for professionals, etc. These tend to support people who already have more money, though. A possible exception is that the pensions in some cases act as a de facto welfare system, because pensioners are expected to support their unemployed kids, so in the case of poor households, one pension supports a meagre lifestyle for 3-4 people. So as long as you have at least one pensioner in your household, there is some minimum level of guaranteed income. If you don't, say that you're a long-term-unemployed 40-year-old who doesn't have family support, then you're pretty much screwed. At best you may try to get some support from the church, which runs soup kitchens and such. And of course it has a big tax-evasion and corruption problem, also largely among the better-off segments of society, which causes problems on the revenue end.

No1 11y ago

You may be interested in the book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, which recounts some stories of how the process was carried out by the author.