7 ms·

The system is fucked beyond repair. There is no 'Greek' system or 'English' system - it's all the same, it's all interconnected - so someone in Europe must liv

The system is fucked beyond repair. There is no 'Greek' system or 'English' system - it's all the same, it's all interconnected - so someone in Europe must live the consequences of political decisions in China or the United States or any other country, really. And that's to be expected, because the system was not 'engineered', but hacked together in time - sometimes in response to crises, sometimes influenced by insane political promises or compromises, sometimes by greed or fear. Yet we try to fix the problems in each individual 'state' - this might work for some problems, but for others - the ones faced by countries such as Greece - it's hopeless - the solution (if any) might not be in Greece at all. This is the rare case when refactoring just doesn't cut it, we need a complete rewrite of the whole thing.

DickingAround 10y ago
I don't understand this comment. What about this article makes you think the Greeks can't make decisions for themselves? Is their land unsuitable for farming, and manufacture, and services? Did someone setup an embargo against them? Furthermore, the idea of needing to overhaul things at a global level makes many assumptions. For example, that anyone has the authority and intelligence to tell the entire world how it should function.
- netsharc 10y ago
  Decisions for themselves? Hah. It's not in the article, but Schäuble and the other EU finance ministers have set out to make an example out of Greece, or the apparatchiks just don't like the radical lefties that got into power. Paul Krugman has mused, before, EUcrats could tell government officials what to do, and when they follow them, even if the country fails and they get voted out, they'd get cushy EU jobs. But the current Greek government don't want cushy EU jobs, they want to save the population. That and other things (domino effect, if Greece gets forgiveness, the other countries would want it too) mean it is in the EUcrats' best interest to see Greece fail. Meanwhile, Schäuble's policy of Austerity über Alles mean the Greek government has been forced to abandon policies that might've rebooted the economy, and be forced to cut spending in hopes that the "confidence fairy" shows up. Even the IMF has said this policy is stupid...
  - DanielBMarkham 10y ago
    Just so I'm clear, you are claiming that the finance ministers are purposely rigging things so that Greece will fail -- that all those loans and such were part of a plan to make an example out of them. First I've heard of this, but I haven't been following it. It sounds quite far-fetched though. I must be missing something.
    - StavrosK 10y ago
      I don't know if it's a "plan", but it's definitely a rigidity and "it's our way or the highway", because they can afford it. The current measures are beyond stupid. They've crippled the country's economy, shut down a large majority of businesses, made the climate hostile to new businesses, and generally ensured that the country doesn't recover. I don't think we've still seen the worst of it, because the economy has shut down almost completely, and it's still getting worse. The effect of this much deterioration on such a large system will take years to show, and what we're seeing now are the results of policies five years ago. I'm pretty confident it will get even worse in the next half-decade. Very much to blame for this is the leftist mindset of the average Greek, who thinks "bosses are the devil" and that making the country friendlier to entrepreneurship and investments is anathema.
    - cloudjacker 10y ago
      It's not about Greece or the people of Greece or its economy, it is about existing creditors of Greek assets having time to limit exposure and fallout to the broader financial system, as well as provide a framework of deterrents for other large European countries that are practically insolvent
    - soVeryTired 10y ago
      I wouldn't go as far as the OP: I think Heinlein's razor comes into effect here. There is a clear solution to the problem, which is debt forgiveness. The troika has known this since the crisis began. The problem is that it's politically untenable. So instead they kick the can down the road, do nothing, and hope everything gets better on its own. They've caused a depression in Greece. They've also turned me into a euroskeptic.
- cloudjacker 10y ago
  Where have you been for the whole decade There is no self determination possible for Greece
  - pjmorris 10y ago
    It is astonishingly sad to me that the country from which Democracy was exported no longer has a say (or do they?)
    - nradov 10y ago
      Greece does have a say. They can choose to secede from the EU, drop out of the Euro, and default on their debts. And then they'll have to live with the consequences. But democracy doesn't mean they can vote to force other countries to forgive their debts.
      - pjmorris 10y ago
        History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. Germany was in the same position wrt to the League of Nations after WWI.
      - MrMullen 10y ago
        > But democracy doesn't mean they can vote to force other countries to forgive their debts. Bingo! Greece can do whatever it wants. If they want to stay in the Euro, then they can stay in the Euro but have to follow certain guidelines. If they want to do what they want to do then they can leave the Euro, but they should not complain when their overspending ways catch up to them and it all falls apart.
  - krona 10y ago
    Why the downvotes? "Elections change nothing. There are rules." -- Wolfgang Schäuble (in reference to the election of a Greek government in 2015)
    - tzmudzin 10y ago
- delegate 10y ago
  Just like everyone else, Greeks want to buy Samsung and Apple and Sony and VW and Facebook ads and materials and services from all over the world. It's the way our system works - I want avocados now, even though I'm thousands km away from an avocado tree. One solution would be for me to give up on the avocado, but then the world needs me to buy it, otherwise the balance of avocados in the economy will move and the futures will go down and everyone panics and now maybe I will say no to mangos too ... sell, sell, sell! This is how it works - not because someone conceptualised, thought through the whole complexity - it just ended up being like this.. > For example, that anyone has the authority and intelligence to tell the entire world how it should function. I'm not getting my hopes too high for a global change - in fact I think this can't happen without some sort of global crisis or conflict preceding it. It's very easy to see that the system is broken - much harder to fix it of course.
  - DickingAround 10y ago
    A very reasonable response. Thank you. I would like to push back on one point of the top though, I don't think the world is so locked in to the consumption of a small nation or any small population. Indeed, panic would happen if America banned imports. But if many in Greece had to take a step back and dramatically reduce their IPhone consumption until they invented new ways to add value, I doubt anyone would notice. The panic of a Greek default seemed to more step from the many who invested there without expecting a collapse. Even now I think a Greek default would be pretty non-eventful given how much warning time everyone had. (Debt defaults of small countries being relatively common)
elcct 10y ago
I think faults in each country have one thing in common - socialism and excessive bureaucracy that comes with it.
- webscaleizfun 10y ago
  Its still extremely dangerous to give birth in the US when compared to Greece, our maternal death rate is 7x higher [1], on par with Iran, Hungary and Saudi Arabia. [1] - http://www.indexmundi.com/g/r.aspx?v=2223 http://www.indexmundi.com/g/r.aspx?v=2223
  - rglullis 10y ago
    What a horrible display of "Lies, damn lies, and statistics." 0,021% death rate is far from "extremely dangerous", and why the focus on this one specific chart? Amazing cherry-picking you've done.
    - webscaleizfun 10y ago
      Why do hundreds of pregnant women die every year in the US, but significantly less die in Singapore, Greece, Canada, Ireland, etc? This shouldn't be a thing, and we shouldn't be this far behind other countries on this, its not an impossible problem to halve or even cut into a quarter that death rate. This isn't even discussing complications of pregnancy or infant mortality, both of which we are not doing amazing at.
      - rglullis 10y ago
        I am not contesting that the US could be doing better. What I am contesting is that you are conflating absolute and relative measurements to try to make a point, and that you are reducing such a complex matter into a question of political ideology that governs the countries. Also, lots of weasel-wording there - e.g, "hundreds of deaths" in country of 320+ million people, comparing with countries that are 100x smaller? - which do show a lack of intellectual honesty. At least that is the impression that it gives when I read your response as some kind of counterpoint to the comment from GP about socialism and the associated bureaucracy. If I have read your statement correctly and indeed you meant something along the lines of: - The USA is doing worse than Greece in this one metric. - Greece has more Socialist/Welfare-state inclinations than the US. - Therefore if we want to improve this one metric we ought to adopt more Social-Democratic policies Consider this: the best country in the list you provided is Estonia, the country with the "Most Competitive Tax System in the OECD"[1], which would basically be an argument that all countries should be like Estonia - a polar opposite from Greece. But then again, I could have completely misread what you meant. Please correct me if I misinterpreted any of your statements. [1]: http://taxfoundation.org/blog/estonia-has-most-competitive-tax-system-oecd http://taxfoundation.org/blog/estonia-has-most-competitive-t... (Note to down-voters: do you really think that anything I wrote is so offensive or damaging to the forum, to the point that it deserves to be in negative mark? Gee, I know it is election season for most of you, but let's please keep a HN a place where people can have an honest discussion?)
nannal 10y ago
>This is the rare case when refactoring just doesn't cut it, we need a complete rewrite of the whole thing. Does anyone have access to the world government dev environment? I mean the code may need re-writing but we could probably use the same infrastructure.
- webscaleizfun 10y ago
  Well, you've got this amazing compiler that just likes to change things you write, they're known as politicians :P
  - sgift 10y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probabilistic_programming_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probabilistic_programming_lang... ?
- wu-ikkyu 10y ago
  >Does anyone have access to the world government dev environment The banks with super admin privileges to create money in their databases do.
  - hx87 10y ago
    If everybody had an account with the central banks, sure. For now the SUs only have access to the major-banks sandbox, and playing around in this sandbox does nothing except cause asset inflation.
    - wu-ikkyu 10y ago
      The 2008 bailout and subsequent legislation[1] indicates it is the major-banks (i.e. JP Morgan, BOA) which have the leverage to create money at will over the central-banks (i.e. the Fed). Hence the term "Too Big to Fail" -- de facto SUs. Doesn't the major-banks' sandbox extend across the world to any person or government who accepts the dollar? [1]http://www.businessinsider.com/congressional-budget-makes-room-for-big-bank-bailouts-2014-12 http://www.businessinsider.com/congressional-budget-makes-ro...
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
neffy 10y ago
The other problem is that the Economists who try to control it and debug it are terrible at understanding it. Every countries economy is subtly different, but they have a one size fits nobody, and doesn´t even have the right number of sleeves approach to it. For example, Greece. http://www.tradingeconomics.com/greece/money-supply-m3 http://www.tradingeconomics.com/greece/money-supply-m3 Expand it out to the max - this is an old style, US Great Depression monetary collapse. Their money supply has dropped by about a third since 2009. Some of that is loan write-offs, a lot of it is money being withdrawn from the country, either by rich people who want their money in safer banks, or as debt repayments to european banks. Cost of being in the Euro, very hard to stop this. Knowing that the money supply has dropped by 1/3, we also know that the lending supply has dropped by 1/3, loans create money etc. Knowing that credit influences prices, we know that property prices are dropping through the floor. Knowing all that, we also know that tax revenue has dropped, because there´s less money circulating to be taxed. (Well, it´s a bit more complex than that but not much.) The big issue in this kind of monetary collapse is very simple. In a market based economy, most prices can adjust to changes in the money supply and production over time. The one exception is debt, which keeps its coupon value until people default. Revalue Greece debt though, and there goes a whole bunch of European banks with greek debt on their books, and a GFC style cascade failure to who knows where in the system. It probably could still all be sorted out if we put some decent computer scientists on the case, but I certainly don´t expect the economists to get there in time. So I guess Greece will just have to invade Germany.
- hx87 10y ago
  > Revalue Greece debt though, and there goes a whole bunch of European banks with greek debt on their books, and a GFC style cascade failure to who knows where in the system. If that's true, then one possible solution would be to let the cascade failure happen while the ECB prints enough money to replace the losses in money supply (and then some) and distribute the money equally to everyone in the Eurozone.
  - aluhut 10y ago
    The official answer to this that it would cause uncertainty regarding future decisions. And I won't even start with devaluation, the geopolitical position of Greece or the chaos on the streets.

DickingAround 10y ago

I don't understand this comment. What about this article makes you think the Greeks can't make decisions for themselves? Is their land unsuitable for farming, and manufacture, and services? Did someone setup an embargo against them? Furthermore, the idea of needing to overhaul things at a global level makes many assumptions. For example, that anyone has the authority and intelligence to tell the entire world how it should function.

netsharc 10y ago
Decisions for themselves? Hah. It's not in the article, but Schäuble and the other EU finance ministers have set out to make an example out of Greece, or the apparatchiks just don't like the radical lefties that got into power. Paul Krugman has mused, before, EUcrats could tell government officials what to do, and when they follow them, even if the country fails and they get voted out, they'd get cushy EU jobs. But the current Greek government don't want cushy EU jobs, they want to save the population. That and other things (domino effect, if Greece gets forgiveness, the other countries would want it too) mean it is in the EUcrats' best interest to see Greece fail. Meanwhile, Schäuble's policy of Austerity über Alles mean the Greek government has been forced to abandon policies that might've rebooted the economy, and be forced to cut spending in hopes that the "confidence fairy" shows up. Even the IMF has said this policy is stupid...
- DanielBMarkham 10y ago
  Just so I'm clear, you are claiming that the finance ministers are purposely rigging things so that Greece will fail -- that all those loans and such were part of a plan to make an example out of them. First I've heard of this, but I haven't been following it. It sounds quite far-fetched though. I must be missing something.
  - StavrosK 10y ago
    I don't know if it's a "plan", but it's definitely a rigidity and "it's our way or the highway", because they can afford it. The current measures are beyond stupid. They've crippled the country's economy, shut down a large majority of businesses, made the climate hostile to new businesses, and generally ensured that the country doesn't recover. I don't think we've still seen the worst of it, because the economy has shut down almost completely, and it's still getting worse. The effect of this much deterioration on such a large system will take years to show, and what we're seeing now are the results of policies five years ago. I'm pretty confident it will get even worse in the next half-decade. Very much to blame for this is the leftist mindset of the average Greek, who thinks "bosses are the devil" and that making the country friendlier to entrepreneurship and investments is anathema.
  - cloudjacker 10y ago
    It's not about Greece or the people of Greece or its economy, it is about existing creditors of Greek assets having time to limit exposure and fallout to the broader financial system, as well as provide a framework of deterrents for other large European countries that are practically insolvent
  - soVeryTired 10y ago
    I wouldn't go as far as the OP: I think Heinlein's razor comes into effect here. There is a clear solution to the problem, which is debt forgiveness. The troika has known this since the crisis began. The problem is that it's politically untenable. So instead they kick the can down the road, do nothing, and hope everything gets better on its own. They've caused a depression in Greece. They've also turned me into a euroskeptic.
cloudjacker 10y ago
Where have you been for the whole decade There is no self determination possible for Greece
- pjmorris 10y ago
  It is astonishingly sad to me that the country from which Democracy was exported no longer has a say (or do they?)
  - nradov 10y ago
    Greece does have a say. They can choose to secede from the EU, drop out of the Euro, and default on their debts. And then they'll have to live with the consequences. But democracy doesn't mean they can vote to force other countries to forgive their debts.
    - pjmorris 10y ago
      History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. Germany was in the same position wrt to the League of Nations after WWI.
    - MrMullen 10y ago
      > But democracy doesn't mean they can vote to force other countries to forgive their debts. Bingo! Greece can do whatever it wants. If they want to stay in the Euro, then they can stay in the Euro but have to follow certain guidelines. If they want to do what they want to do then they can leave the Euro, but they should not complain when their overspending ways catch up to them and it all falls apart.
- krona 10y ago
  Why the downvotes? "Elections change nothing. There are rules." -- Wolfgang Schäuble (in reference to the election of a Greek government in 2015)
  - tzmudzin 10y ago
delegate 10y ago
Just like everyone else, Greeks want to buy Samsung and Apple and Sony and VW and Facebook ads and materials and services from all over the world. It's the way our system works - I want avocados now, even though I'm thousands km away from an avocado tree. One solution would be for me to give up on the avocado, but then the world needs me to buy it, otherwise the balance of avocados in the economy will move and the futures will go down and everyone panics and now maybe I will say no to mangos too ... sell, sell, sell! This is how it works - not because someone conceptualised, thought through the whole complexity - it just ended up being like this.. > For example, that anyone has the authority and intelligence to tell the entire world how it should function. I'm not getting my hopes too high for a global change - in fact I think this can't happen without some sort of global crisis or conflict preceding it. It's very easy to see that the system is broken - much harder to fix it of course.
- DickingAround 10y ago
  A very reasonable response. Thank you. I would like to push back on one point of the top though, I don't think the world is so locked in to the consumption of a small nation or any small population. Indeed, panic would happen if America banned imports. But if many in Greece had to take a step back and dramatically reduce their IPhone consumption until they invented new ways to add value, I doubt anyone would notice. The panic of a Greek default seemed to more step from the many who invested there without expecting a collapse. Even now I think a Greek default would be pretty non-eventful given how much warning time everyone had. (Debt defaults of small countries being relatively common)

elcct 10y ago

I think faults in each country have one thing in common - socialism and excessive bureaucracy that comes with it.

webscaleizfun 10y ago
Its still extremely dangerous to give birth in the US when compared to Greece, our maternal death rate is 7x higher [1], on par with Iran, Hungary and Saudi Arabia. [1] - http://www.indexmundi.com/g/r.aspx?v=2223 http://www.indexmundi.com/g/r.aspx?v=2223
- rglullis 10y ago
  What a horrible display of "Lies, damn lies, and statistics." 0,021% death rate is far from "extremely dangerous", and why the focus on this one specific chart? Amazing cherry-picking you've done.
  - webscaleizfun 10y ago
    Why do hundreds of pregnant women die every year in the US, but significantly less die in Singapore, Greece, Canada, Ireland, etc? This shouldn't be a thing, and we shouldn't be this far behind other countries on this, its not an impossible problem to halve or even cut into a quarter that death rate. This isn't even discussing complications of pregnancy or infant mortality, both of which we are not doing amazing at.
    - rglullis 10y ago
      I am not contesting that the US could be doing better. What I am contesting is that you are conflating absolute and relative measurements to try to make a point, and that you are reducing such a complex matter into a question of political ideology that governs the countries. Also, lots of weasel-wording there - e.g, "hundreds of deaths" in country of 320+ million people, comparing with countries that are 100x smaller? - which do show a lack of intellectual honesty. At least that is the impression that it gives when I read your response as some kind of counterpoint to the comment from GP about socialism and the associated bureaucracy. If I have read your statement correctly and indeed you meant something along the lines of: - The USA is doing worse than Greece in this one metric. - Greece has more Socialist/Welfare-state inclinations than the US. - Therefore if we want to improve this one metric we ought to adopt more Social-Democratic policies Consider this: the best country in the list you provided is Estonia, the country with the "Most Competitive Tax System in the OECD"[1], which would basically be an argument that all countries should be like Estonia - a polar opposite from Greece. But then again, I could have completely misread what you meant. Please correct me if I misinterpreted any of your statements. [1]: http://taxfoundation.org/blog/estonia-has-most-competitive-tax-system-oecd http://taxfoundation.org/blog/estonia-has-most-competitive-t... (Note to down-voters: do you really think that anything I wrote is so offensive or damaging to the forum, to the point that it deserves to be in negative mark? Gee, I know it is election season for most of you, but let's please keep a HN a place where people can have an honest discussion?)

nannal 10y ago

>This is the rare case when refactoring just doesn't cut it, we need a complete rewrite of the whole thing. Does anyone have access to the world government dev environment? I mean the code may need re-writing but we could probably use the same infrastructure.

webscaleizfun 10y ago
Well, you've got this amazing compiler that just likes to change things you write, they're known as politicians :P
- sgift 10y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probabilistic_programming_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probabilistic_programming_lang... ?
wu-ikkyu 10y ago
>Does anyone have access to the world government dev environment The banks with super admin privileges to create money in their databases do.
- hx87 10y ago
  If everybody had an account with the central banks, sure. For now the SUs only have access to the major-banks sandbox, and playing around in this sandbox does nothing except cause asset inflation.
  - wu-ikkyu 10y ago
    The 2008 bailout and subsequent legislation[1] indicates it is the major-banks (i.e. JP Morgan, BOA) which have the leverage to create money at will over the central-banks (i.e. the Fed). Hence the term "Too Big to Fail" -- de facto SUs. Doesn't the major-banks' sandbox extend across the world to any person or government who accepts the dollar? [1]http://www.businessinsider.com/congressional-budget-makes-room-for-big-bank-bailouts-2014-12 http://www.businessinsider.com/congressional-budget-makes-ro...

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

neffy 10y ago

The other problem is that the Economists who try to control it and debug it are terrible at understanding it. Every countries economy is subtly different, but they have a one size fits nobody, and doesn´t even have the right number of sleeves approach to it. For example, Greece. http://www.tradingeconomics.com/greece/money-supply-m3 http://www.tradingeconomics.com/greece/money-supply-m3 Expand it out to the max - this is an old style, US Great Depression monetary collapse. Their money supply has dropped by about a third since 2009. Some of that is loan write-offs, a lot of it is money being withdrawn from the country, either by rich people who want their money in safer banks, or as debt repayments to european banks. Cost of being in the Euro, very hard to stop this. Knowing that the money supply has dropped by 1/3, we also know that the lending supply has dropped by 1/3, loans create money etc. Knowing that credit influences prices, we know that property prices are dropping through the floor. Knowing all that, we also know that tax revenue has dropped, because there´s less money circulating to be taxed. (Well, it´s a bit more complex than that but not much.) The big issue in this kind of monetary collapse is very simple. In a market based economy, most prices can adjust to changes in the money supply and production over time. The one exception is debt, which keeps its coupon value until people default. Revalue Greece debt though, and there goes a whole bunch of European banks with greek debt on their books, and a GFC style cascade failure to who knows where in the system. It probably could still all be sorted out if we put some decent computer scientists on the case, but I certainly don´t expect the economists to get there in time. So I guess Greece will just have to invade Germany.

hx87 10y ago
> Revalue Greece debt though, and there goes a whole bunch of European banks with greek debt on their books, and a GFC style cascade failure to who knows where in the system. If that's true, then one possible solution would be to let the cascade failure happen while the ECB prints enough money to replace the losses in money supply (and then some) and distribute the money equally to everyone in the Eurozone.
- aluhut 10y ago
  The official answer to this that it would cause uncertainty regarding future decisions. And I won't even start with devaluation, the geopolitical position of Greece or the chaos on the streets.