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The Greek people are responsible. Greeks overspent and did not want to stop. So they kept spending. It's their own fault. They can default, start printing the

The Greek people are responsible. Greeks overspent and did not want to stop. So they kept spending. It's their own fault. They can default, start printing their own money and go the way of Argentina. Ask Argentines how that went. Or ... they can cut spending and live within their means. The narrative of "Greeks as victims" is "okay" as long as you point out that they are also the victimizers. Evil outsiders did not force them to not collect taxes. People can get public pensions before age 50, for heaven's sake. [ source : http://greece.greekreporter.com/2014/12/04/75-of-greek-pensioners-enjoy-early-retirement/ http://greece.greekreporter.com/2014/12/04/75-of-greek-pensi... ]

gonvaled 11y ago
They overspent. Their economy is dysfunctional. They share a big part of the blame. But they have been following the Troika's plan for over 7 years now, they have reduced spending, they have done a huge effort, and still their GDP has collapsed. It seems that the Troika's plan is not working. That is what Tsipras is saying: we can not continue doing this, and the rest of Europe/Troika has to recognize part of the blame. Not only that: it seems it has the support of his people (we'll see on Sunday) If Greece had defaulted (or restructured the debt) at the beginning of this crisis, as Iceland did, the situation would be much better. But nobody was interested, since big banks where holding big chunks of high-paying Greek debt, and they needed some time to unload it. I still remember how the Iceland success story was completely ignored by European media - and still is.
- tosseraccount 11y ago
  Iceland (Island) is 300,000 people and did NOT join the EU. Iceland collects their taxes. Iceland dealt with problem promptly. Greece needs to bite the bullet. Harder. Stop blaming others.
  - DannoHung 11y ago
    > On October 6, the Icelandic legislature instituted an emergency law which enabled the Financial Supervisory Authority to take control over financial institutions and made domestic deposits in the banks priority claims. In the following days, new banks were founded to take over the domestic operations of Kaupthing, Landsbanki and Glitnir. The old banks were put into receivership and liquidation, resulting in losses for their shareholders and foreign creditors. Outside Iceland, more than half a million depositors lost access to their accounts in foreign branches of Icelandic banks. This led to the 2008-2013 Icesave dispute, that ended with a ESA ruling that Iceland was not obliged to repay Dutch and British depositors minimum deposit guarantees. So, what you're saying is default and fuck over foreign investors.
    - tehmaco 11y ago
      > So, what you're saying is default and fuck over foreign investors. Yes. A government should have its own people as it's primary concern.
      - DannoHung 11y ago
        Ah, "Bite the Bullet" in this context sounds more like you're saying, "MORE AUSTERITY!" and that you weren't aware of what Iceland actually did.
    - mcv 11y ago
      Exactly. Default and fuck over foreign investors, because that's what investors are for. They take risk. If they win, they get profit. If they lose, they carry the loss. This entire mess is getting out of hand because Germany wants to shield the investors from that risk.
- drzaiusapelord 11y ago
  >But they have been following the Troika's plan for over 7 years now Except they aren't. They aren't fixing their tax fraud - no one is paying enough taxes. They didn't fix their retirement age, there are easy loopholes around it, etc and a million other things. Greek fraud predated this plan and worked during this plan. The EU cant fix Greece's corrupt governments and leaders. That's why we're where we're at right now. Also Iceland is a edge case. It has one tenth the amount of people of the city I live in. Its like a small suburb going broke. Greece has 12 million people. More than likely you're looking at an Argentina-like situation.
  - sergiosgc 11y ago
    > They aren't fixing their tax fraud - no one is paying enough taxes. This is something that takes a long time. It is unrealistic to expect Greeks can fix something like this in the time-frame needed to solve this crisis. Worse, during a crisis there is pressure to escape taxation making the job a lot more difficult. I'm from Portugal. Portugal had Greek levels of tax fraud in the 80s. It took twenty years, from the late 90s onward, to get to decent levels of fraud. I rate the work done here as excellent. And even then, it took two decades! If Europe were serious about helping Greece, they'd be assisting with setting up an efficient finance ministry, not jacking up VAT levels and pushing more of the economy outside legality.
  - cgio 11y ago
    Ok we got it, you don't like Greeks even though you are one. No need to reiterate a thousand times. We judge the austerity program and theoretically, with your assertions on the volume of flaws in the Greek economy, it should be easy to demonstrate improvements in 6-7 years. The opposite happened, therefore something was wrong with the imported wisdom and despite the moral integrity of the troika (the troika is not Greeks, that should give you some confidence.)
- tonylemesmer 11y ago
  do you mean Iceland? [edit] did not know that. thx (I could not reply to the replies)
  - tosseraccount 11y ago
    It's "Island" in the local, Viking dialect.
    - toothbrush 11y ago
      If we're going to act as if we're using the local name, it should probably be Ísland. :)
  - gonvaled 11y ago
    Sure, thx. (in Spanish it is "Islandia")
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  Austerity plans always fail to produce results. They never work. They never worked in any of the dozens of countries the IMF and World Bank forced them on in the developing world, they didn't work in Ireland, and they aren't working in Greece. Austerity isn't just faith in the absence of evidence, its face in spite of overwhelming evidence.
  - tosseraccount 11y ago
    "Austerity" worked in Britain and Ireland. Fiscal responsibility is good policy ... for individual, households, companies and governments! http://www.tradingeconomics.com/ireland/gdp-growth-annual http://www.tradingeconomics.com/ireland/gdp-growth-annual http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/gdp-growth-annual http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/gdp-growth-an... [ set start year to 2008 ]
    - the_why_of_y 11y ago
      The UK GDP actually performed better during the Great Depression of the 1930s, and that was despite deflation due to the gold standard in the early years - doesn't sound like a success story to me. http://www.economicshelp.org/blog/7209/economics/comparing-different-recessions/ http://www.economicshelp.org/blog/7209/economics/comparing-d... I've always wondered about Ireland - it seems they have a strategy for the last decade or so of positioning their country as a tax haven, so that multi-national corporations tend to incorporate in Ireland and move their profits that are actually made in other countries there by creative accounting (like Intellectual Property licensing deals between subsidiaries). What effect does that have on GDP? Has anybody investigated this?
  - gonvaled 11y ago
    I wouldn't say it never works: containing spending is good policy. It worked, for example, in Spain. But Spain had going for it that the economy (although badly performing) was doing much better than Greece at the start of the crisis, and specially that the markets had somebody else to bet against, namely Greece. The Spanish bond risk premium (compared to German bonds) was widening rapidly, but the Greece one was humongous. So, the market pressure was a huge problem for Greece. While the market was betting against Greece (and making handsome profits with big interests and, as we now know, zero risk), Spain was quietly improving. I am sure that, if Greece had been brought to its knees by the market, the next to fall would have been Spain (well, the next in line was probably Portugal). In that situation, austerity measures are actually counter-productive. This is what we have in Greece. Europe needs to face the markets here. And the problem is that, once Greece defaults in the following weeks (if Europe decides to let it fall, that is), Portugal will be the next to feel the pressure. Spain is probably out of the woods by now - by luck, so to speak.
rasz_pl 11y ago
Germans were pretty happy lending them more and more money.
codyb 11y ago
I'm not sure if this is accurate or not, but didn't Argentina get fucked by the IMF? I know a lot of those South American countries were essentially hollowed out by IMF and forced to privatize a lot of their natural resources resulting in tremendous amounts of wealth inequality and a shrinking of their middle classes. Of course, this is along with US Military backed coups happening left and right to any country which didn't privatize their countries resources so that American and Western European corporations could get "their share" (i.e. Nestle which still controls something like 90% of the bottled water market in South and Central America). Gotta love Friedman and his Chicago boys! "If no one will elect us to power, we'll just support dictators! Free market principles at their finest!" - My made up quote for Milton Friedman, Jack Lew, and all the rest of those cronies. Anyways, I'm at work, so I can't look up sources, but "Shock Doctrine" by Naomi Klein is a great read about this sort of thing.
- tosseraccount 11y ago
  How's Chile faring compared with Cuba? 2 points: #1 Do you have a link for "Nestle owns 90% of the Central and South American bottled water market" ? #2 How hard is it to compete in the bottled water market?
andrepd 11y ago
They are to blame for the mistakes committed up until the bailout. The destructive IMF/ECB mandated policies, that held down Greece's economy from any possibility of meaningful recovery all the while making the citizens poorer and poorer, all so that the big banks could effectively have the risk from their investments offloaded to the taxpayers, is totally not Greece's fault.
yequalsx 11y ago
Do you believe the banks share any responsibility for lending so much to such a dysfunctional country?
- tosseraccount 11y ago
  Some. Banks need to bite the bullet, too. Private banks were apparently smart enough to dump this on the IMF. I don't have a problem with the IMF going bankrupt. Private lenders can better deal with these kinds of shenanigans anyway. The threat of bankruptcy forces them to spread out their risks better. No need for IMF to compete with them.
- pvaldes 11y ago
  Lending is not the only problem. If you drive like crazy you are the problem, but if all policemen in the city see your dysfunctional driving for many years and just smile and do nothing to stop you and finally somebody died, the police is also part of the problem. How many surveying organisms in Europe related with economy failed to see this coming? All? What is the statistic probability of this happening just by chance in Ireland, and then in Portugal, and also in Spain, and again in Greece, and...? All at the same time...
netcan 11y ago
I agree and I said as much. The question is what now. They have cut spending. They still can't pay on their loans. They can run their government, but not pay back the debt. If you care mostly about just dues or moral hazards, there are two sides to a bad loan: borrowers and lenders. When things go bad, the borrower suffers bankruptcy and the lender suffers a default. The lenders need to get their dues too. The German government decided to bail them out (with the EU & IMF), so they won't. That part isn't Greece's fault.

gonvaled 11y ago

They overspent. Their economy is dysfunctional. They share a big part of the blame. But they have been following the Troika's plan for over 7 years now, they have reduced spending, they have done a huge effort, and still their GDP has collapsed. It seems that the Troika's plan is not working. That is what Tsipras is saying: we can not continue doing this, and the rest of Europe/Troika has to recognize part of the blame. Not only that: it seems it has the support of his people (we'll see on Sunday) If Greece had defaulted (or restructured the debt) at the beginning of this crisis, as Iceland did, the situation would be much better. But nobody was interested, since big banks where holding big chunks of high-paying Greek debt, and they needed some time to unload it. I still remember how the Iceland success story was completely ignored by European media - and still is.

tosseraccount 11y ago
Iceland (Island) is 300,000 people and did NOT join the EU. Iceland collects their taxes. Iceland dealt with problem promptly. Greece needs to bite the bullet. Harder. Stop blaming others.
- DannoHung 11y ago
  > On October 6, the Icelandic legislature instituted an emergency law which enabled the Financial Supervisory Authority to take control over financial institutions and made domestic deposits in the banks priority claims. In the following days, new banks were founded to take over the domestic operations of Kaupthing, Landsbanki and Glitnir. The old banks were put into receivership and liquidation, resulting in losses for their shareholders and foreign creditors. Outside Iceland, more than half a million depositors lost access to their accounts in foreign branches of Icelandic banks. This led to the 2008-2013 Icesave dispute, that ended with a ESA ruling that Iceland was not obliged to repay Dutch and British depositors minimum deposit guarantees. So, what you're saying is default and fuck over foreign investors.
  - tehmaco 11y ago
    > So, what you're saying is default and fuck over foreign investors. Yes. A government should have its own people as it's primary concern.
    - DannoHung 11y ago
      Ah, "Bite the Bullet" in this context sounds more like you're saying, "MORE AUSTERITY!" and that you weren't aware of what Iceland actually did.
  - mcv 11y ago
    Exactly. Default and fuck over foreign investors, because that's what investors are for. They take risk. If they win, they get profit. If they lose, they carry the loss. This entire mess is getting out of hand because Germany wants to shield the investors from that risk.
drzaiusapelord 11y ago
>But they have been following the Troika's plan for over 7 years now Except they aren't. They aren't fixing their tax fraud - no one is paying enough taxes. They didn't fix their retirement age, there are easy loopholes around it, etc and a million other things. Greek fraud predated this plan and worked during this plan. The EU cant fix Greece's corrupt governments and leaders. That's why we're where we're at right now. Also Iceland is a edge case. It has one tenth the amount of people of the city I live in. Its like a small suburb going broke. Greece has 12 million people. More than likely you're looking at an Argentina-like situation.
- sergiosgc 11y ago
  > They aren't fixing their tax fraud - no one is paying enough taxes. This is something that takes a long time. It is unrealistic to expect Greeks can fix something like this in the time-frame needed to solve this crisis. Worse, during a crisis there is pressure to escape taxation making the job a lot more difficult. I'm from Portugal. Portugal had Greek levels of tax fraud in the 80s. It took twenty years, from the late 90s onward, to get to decent levels of fraud. I rate the work done here as excellent. And even then, it took two decades! If Europe were serious about helping Greece, they'd be assisting with setting up an efficient finance ministry, not jacking up VAT levels and pushing more of the economy outside legality.
- cgio 11y ago
  Ok we got it, you don't like Greeks even though you are one. No need to reiterate a thousand times. We judge the austerity program and theoretically, with your assertions on the volume of flaws in the Greek economy, it should be easy to demonstrate improvements in 6-7 years. The opposite happened, therefore something was wrong with the imported wisdom and despite the moral integrity of the troika (the troika is not Greeks, that should give you some confidence.)
tonylemesmer 11y ago
do you mean Iceland? [edit] did not know that. thx (I could not reply to the replies)
- tosseraccount 11y ago
  It's "Island" in the local, Viking dialect.
  - toothbrush 11y ago
    If we're going to act as if we're using the local name, it should probably be Ísland. :)
- gonvaled 11y ago
  Sure, thx. (in Spanish it is "Islandia")
dragonwriter 11y ago
Austerity plans always fail to produce results. They never work. They never worked in any of the dozens of countries the IMF and World Bank forced them on in the developing world, they didn't work in Ireland, and they aren't working in Greece. Austerity isn't just faith in the absence of evidence, its face in spite of overwhelming evidence.
- tosseraccount 11y ago
  "Austerity" worked in Britain and Ireland. Fiscal responsibility is good policy ... for individual, households, companies and governments! http://www.tradingeconomics.com/ireland/gdp-growth-annual http://www.tradingeconomics.com/ireland/gdp-growth-annual http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/gdp-growth-annual http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/gdp-growth-an... [ set start year to 2008 ]
  - the_why_of_y 11y ago
    The UK GDP actually performed better during the Great Depression of the 1930s, and that was despite deflation due to the gold standard in the early years - doesn't sound like a success story to me. http://www.economicshelp.org/blog/7209/economics/comparing-different-recessions/ http://www.economicshelp.org/blog/7209/economics/comparing-d... I've always wondered about Ireland - it seems they have a strategy for the last decade or so of positioning their country as a tax haven, so that multi-national corporations tend to incorporate in Ireland and move their profits that are actually made in other countries there by creative accounting (like Intellectual Property licensing deals between subsidiaries). What effect does that have on GDP? Has anybody investigated this?
- gonvaled 11y ago
  I wouldn't say it never works: containing spending is good policy. It worked, for example, in Spain. But Spain had going for it that the economy (although badly performing) was doing much better than Greece at the start of the crisis, and specially that the markets had somebody else to bet against, namely Greece. The Spanish bond risk premium (compared to German bonds) was widening rapidly, but the Greece one was humongous. So, the market pressure was a huge problem for Greece. While the market was betting against Greece (and making handsome profits with big interests and, as we now know, zero risk), Spain was quietly improving. I am sure that, if Greece had been brought to its knees by the market, the next to fall would have been Spain (well, the next in line was probably Portugal). In that situation, austerity measures are actually counter-productive. This is what we have in Greece. Europe needs to face the markets here. And the problem is that, once Greece defaults in the following weeks (if Europe decides to let it fall, that is), Portugal will be the next to feel the pressure. Spain is probably out of the woods by now - by luck, so to speak.

rasz_pl 11y ago

Germans were pretty happy lending them more and more money.

codyb 11y ago

I'm not sure if this is accurate or not, but didn't Argentina get fucked by the IMF? I know a lot of those South American countries were essentially hollowed out by IMF and forced to privatize a lot of their natural resources resulting in tremendous amounts of wealth inequality and a shrinking of their middle classes. Of course, this is along with US Military backed coups happening left and right to any country which didn't privatize their countries resources so that American and Western European corporations could get "their share" (i.e. Nestle which still controls something like 90% of the bottled water market in South and Central America). Gotta love Friedman and his Chicago boys! "If no one will elect us to power, we'll just support dictators! Free market principles at their finest!" - My made up quote for Milton Friedman, Jack Lew, and all the rest of those cronies. Anyways, I'm at work, so I can't look up sources, but "Shock Doctrine" by Naomi Klein is a great read about this sort of thing.

tosseraccount 11y ago
How's Chile faring compared with Cuba? 2 points: #1 Do you have a link for "Nestle owns 90% of the Central and South American bottled water market" ? #2 How hard is it to compete in the bottled water market?

andrepd 11y ago

They are to blame for the mistakes committed up until the bailout. The destructive IMF/ECB mandated policies, that held down Greece's economy from any possibility of meaningful recovery all the while making the citizens poorer and poorer, all so that the big banks could effectively have the risk from their investments offloaded to the taxpayers, is totally not Greece's fault.

yequalsx 11y ago

Do you believe the banks share any responsibility for lending so much to such a dysfunctional country?

tosseraccount 11y ago
Some. Banks need to bite the bullet, too. Private banks were apparently smart enough to dump this on the IMF. I don't have a problem with the IMF going bankrupt. Private lenders can better deal with these kinds of shenanigans anyway. The threat of bankruptcy forces them to spread out their risks better. No need for IMF to compete with them.
pvaldes 11y ago
Lending is not the only problem. If you drive like crazy you are the problem, but if all policemen in the city see your dysfunctional driving for many years and just smile and do nothing to stop you and finally somebody died, the police is also part of the problem. How many surveying organisms in Europe related with economy failed to see this coming? All? What is the statistic probability of this happening just by chance in Ireland, and then in Portugal, and also in Spain, and again in Greece, and...? All at the same time...

netcan 11y ago

I agree and I said as much. The question is what now. They have cut spending. They still can't pay on their loans. They can run their government, but not pay back the debt. If you care mostly about just dues or moral hazards, there are two sides to a bad loan: borrowers and lenders. When things go bad, the borrower suffers bankruptcy and the lender suffers a default. The lenders need to get their dues too. The German government decided to bail them out (with the EU & IMF), so they won't. That part isn't Greece's fault.