8 ms·

Real time Greek referendum results

38 points by tristanperry 11y ago

tristanperry 11y ago
Clicking on the little Great Britain flag on the bottom left will change the webpage to English.
z92 11y ago
As of now: 61% No. 39% Yes. [ 51% vote counted ] What's next? I have a gut felling we are seeing the beginning of the end. The situation is not comparable with Iceland, as the whole country has shutdown. No export import. Obviously things can't run like this. It will be interesting to see how they work it out.
- agumonkey 11y ago
  Redditors (for what it's worth) said devalued drachme would worsen the situation. It seems that this referendum will be a dogmatic chimera, pleasing people for his promise, too strong economical forces may bring back Greece under negotiations.
agumonkey 11y ago
pretty telling http://imgur.com/rs2SO89 http://imgur.com/rs2SO89
mratzloff 11y ago
Goodbye, euro. Hello, drachma. The next 10 years are going to be uncomfortable for Greece. Not so much the rest of the Eurozone unless others follow suit.
- return0 11y ago
  Greek here. I don't see any other possible way out. People are currently celebrating for it, though.
  - wavefunction 11y ago
    Perhaps better to fail under your own terms than those of someone else?
    - return0 11y ago
      Perhaps , we ll see . this is a lot more violent than an orderly exit.
  - trhway 11y ago
    >People are currently celebrating for it, though. manipulating currency is one of the way how politicians, bankers and other people in power f&ck regular people. Obviously, being f&cked by your own instead of by foreign politicians/bankers is the more preferable situation. I'm not joking - just look at all the wars there foreign invaders were enthusiastically fought against by the regular people even when their own governing regime was nothing to fight for.
  - BenjiBajing 11y ago
    What? The other way out would simply be to accept the reformations demanded by the EU. Greece would also need a new government as soon as possible. A government that does everything possible to help Greece to regain economic strength. Build new industrie, start-ups, let the tourism in this beautiful country flourish again. The EU has already agreed to give Greece a huge amount of additional money. But they obviously want to make sure that the money is not wasted and stolen by corruption as the hundreds of billions since 2010 [1]. History has proven that socialism doesn't work. You guys need another government, but only have a couple of pigs [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_government-debt_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_government-debt_crisis [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Farm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Farm
    - return0 11y ago
      That was the entire idea of the bailout packages from the start. However, the government still has strong support and not likely to change. At this point, it's fair to say greeks don't want to save themselves.
r721 11y ago
Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9833930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9833930
- 001sky 11y ago
  why link to a discussion flagged of the front page?
  - r721 11y ago
    For people to read the comments made earlier.
gruez 11y ago
Planet Money did a piece about the two options: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/07/01/419238213/episode-636-yes-or-no http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/07/01/419238213/episo...
Mikeb85 11y ago
Good. The conditions set by the troika were shit. Even though Greece's debt is significantly lower than 2010, their debt/GDP ratio is the highest it's been. Europe was trying to influence the referendum with their hard line (ie. blackmail Greece into accepting their shit deal), but they'll backpedal, and maybe Greece can get a deal that's actually sustainable, and doesn't lead to another 25% contraction in the economy.
- hartator 11y ago
  I don't see how the two main consitions of the treaty, having a VAT (sales tax) on the islands and moving retirement age from 60 to 65, were unsubtainable.
  - Mikeb85 11y ago
    First of all, more VAT will decrease tourist dollars spend. It will decrease economic activity. Decrease GDP. Second, when you suddenly tell people who don't have a job (remember, unemployment is already high in Greece, especially among the youth) that they need to find one, it leads to a further strain on employment, and societal tension. And remember, pensioners spend money. The money may come from the government, but it goes into the economy. If this money isn't going back into the Greek economy, the GDP decreases. These measures will only increase unemployment and decrease GDP further. Exactly the opposite of what Greece needs. It may seem like a small thing, but on a macro scale, small changes add up.
    - hartator 11y ago
      I think it's fair for the islands to have the same level of taxation than the mainland. Greek islands shouldn't exist to be the gateway to tax evasion. Pensions are money taken from the working classes and the capital, it doen't magicaly create GDP. Again, it feels fair that a country way poorer per capita than the US or Germany should at least match their retirement age to those country. Corruption, red tape and over spending are the reasons why Greece is in bad shape.
pavlov 11y ago
As a European, I'm somewhat puzzled by why a Greek default has been out of the question. Why is it considered a huge threat to the euro, while in America, large public entities like Detroit and Puerto Rico can apparently default without endangering the USD? Is that just because dollar stands apart as a global currency? In a reasonable world, the parties who loaned Greece all that money for ridiculously low interest rates in 2000-2007 should have suffered the losses. They're the ones who miscalculated the risk, after all. But that ship sailed when the Euro countries bailed out most of that toxic debt with public funds. I just can't understand why. Merkel was in power back then, Tsipras wasn't. Hence I have some sympathy for him.
- hartator 11y ago
  Politics? Technicaly, they are already in default as they have missed payment to the IMF.
- stevewepay 11y ago
  It's never been out of the question. In the years that they have been kicking the can down the road, all of the EU financial institutions have been preparing for this exact thing. You can expect Greece to exit the euro with little to no effect. The euro will of course rise, because the caliber of the remaining countries are much stronger. The real issue is contagion. The EU doesn't want Italy or Spain to go down as well, because the markets/bond vigilantes love to pile on when there is blood in the water. Look at what happened during the Asian currency crisis, it was mass contagion throughout Asia that caused the subsequent problem.
  - _delirium 11y ago
    That's also what, afaict, is keeping the problem from just being solved. Greece is small enough that it's quite possible to restructure their bonds into some workable package rather than kicking the can 6 months at a time. The IMF, for example, was floating a €50 billion debt haircut, which is not a ton of money in absolute terms. Alternate proposals would cap repayment in line with GDP, e.g. 1% of GDP per year, which would in effect amount to writing off a few tens of billion € per year (by letting it inflate away). But the EU is worried about setting a precedent that might impact a much bigger country with bigger debts, like Spain. (The other issue is just pure political constraints. Many EU countries currently have strong populist-right parties either in government or with an influential position in the government, like True Finns and Dansk Folkeparti. These parties are obviously against anything that looks like being "soft on Greece".)
noobie 11y ago
Can someone ELI5 this whole situation in Greece?
- harel 11y ago
  Roughly: Greek economy in bad shape, to put it mildly. Greece take loans from the IMF. Owes lots of money. Greece cannot pay it back. Will not pay it back. Deadline was a day or two ago to deliver a payment of over 1 billion euros (which again, i'm not sure why they are voting for/against a deal that has expired a day or two ago but... well....) Greece can now default on its payments, and as a result, leave the eurozone and the euro. Hello Drachmas. Allegedly Greece's entry into the euro zone was made possible by some banks fudging some numbers to make their economy look appealing while in reality it was already in dire straights. And here we are - the first country about to leave the EU. Hopefully this won't start a trend. I wish I could say "hopefully" with more conviction but I'm really not sure what is best any more. I guess I'm pro europe because I'm also a French national as well as British.
- venomsnake 11y ago
  German banks were stupid and lent money to Greece. 2008 Merkel saved German banks by moving Greek debt from private to public hands. They have been giving money to Greece just enough to cover the interest payments while pursuing a politics of austerity that devastated greek economy and employment. Greeks got fed up and elected government to end austerity. Merkel was stupid [expletive] and refused to give real deal on the table - one that must include basic debt relief. Tsipras got case of no balls and asked greeks to vote instead of just choosing to default. That's is.
- cperciva 11y ago
  Greece is like an orphaned child who really likes eating candy. Back in the 1990s, Greece was eating lots of candy, but it wanted to be adopted into a big and wealthy family, and the parents of that family had a rule that they would not adopt children who ate too much candy. Greece kept on eating lots of candy, but it made faces and pretended that some of the candy was actually vegetables; and because some of the other kids in the family had grown fond of Greece, the parents overlooked the continued candy-eating and officially adopted Greece in 2001. Now, it's sometimes difficult for orphaned children to get their hands on candy, but if you're part of a big and wealthy family, it becomes a lot easier. Just like most children would, Greece started eating a lot more candy. Greece's adopted parents also had rules about how much candy their kids could eat (not just rules for children they were considering adopting) but Greece wasn't the only child who was eating too much candy so they pretty much forgot about those rules for the moment. Then 2008 hit. Some children on the other side of the world started getting sick from eating too much candy, and immediately people started looking around at other children who were eating lots of candy and worrying about them. Greece, which was by this point very much overweight, came to the top of everybody's lists of children who had eaten too much candy. Suddenly nobody was willing to give Greece any more candy, and this made Greece very unhappy. So Greece turned to its adoptive parents and begged them to give it some more candy. While they had ignored Greece's growing waistline earlier, they had also gotten worried about it recently; so they offered Greece a deal: They would give Greece more candy -- not a lot, but enough that Greece could still feel slightly good about itself -- if Greece promised to go outside and get lots of exercise. This worked for a while, and by 2014 Greece was starting to lose weight; but it wasn't very happy with the situation -- Greece wanted to be playing Candy Crush, not running around outside. In January 2015 Greece finally rebelled and told its parents that it was sick of running around outside and wanted a new deal which would allow it to keep eating candy and to be allowed to keep playing Candy Crush. Greece's parents were not very impressed by this, and promptly told Greece that this was not acceptable, and Greece was not going to get any more candy if Greece didn't start doing as it was told. Today, Greece thought about this, answered back with a resounding NO, and slammed the door as it ran away from home. So what happens now? Well, Greece isn't going to be getting any more candy, for one thing. Greece is going to be hungry, but the only way it will be able to eat at all is if it goes out and works hard to get it -- which means it won't have much time to play Candy Crush either. Greece might change its mind and go back to its parents, but at this point they're pretty tired of Greece's rebelliousness and they're not likely to start handing out candy unless they see Greece start running laps first. All in all, Greece is in for a few unhappy years.
new_guy123 11y ago
How come they reversed the dots and commas?
- thesimon 11y ago
  Not all countries use the U.S. style
- rhgraysonii 11y ago
  There are many standards for decimal notation [0]. [0]. http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19455-01/806-0169/overview-9/index.html http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19455-01/806-0169/overview-9/inde...
- WildUtah 11y ago
  Lots of countries get dots and commas backward. [0] Lots of countries also drive on the wrong side [1], but the two seem to have no correlation. [0] http://www.statisticalconsultants.co.nz/blog/how-the-world-separates-its-decimals-m.html http://www.statisticalconsultants.co.nz/blog/how-the-world-s... [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-_and_left-hand_traffic https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-_and_left-hand_traffic
paglia_s 11y ago
Italian here. I think what Greece is going through in economics terms is terrible and the main objective of any deal should be to get the Greece economy to grow once again and I don't think that taxes are going to help. At the same time my country is exposed to Greece for ~40bn € and we did some reforms that nobody liked, like rising retirement age. We should be ready to help Greece but they have to make real reforms, they have their own responsability in their situation and according to what I read they have big problems collecting taxes, corruption and mispending of public funds. They have to make so that in a few years they won't need anymore money from other countries.

38 points by tristanperry 11y ago

Clicking on the little Great Britain flag on the bottom left will change the webpage to English.

z92 11y ago

As of now: 61% No. 39% Yes. [ 51% vote counted ] What's next? I have a gut felling we are seeing the beginning of the end. The situation is not comparable with Iceland, as the whole country has shutdown. No export import. Obviously things can't run like this. It will be interesting to see how they work it out.

agumonkey 11y ago
Redditors (for what it's worth) said devalued drachme would worsen the situation. It seems that this referendum will be a dogmatic chimera, pleasing people for his promise, too strong economical forces may bring back Greece under negotiations.

agumonkey 11y ago

pretty telling http://imgur.com/rs2SO89 http://imgur.com/rs2SO89

mratzloff 11y ago

Goodbye, euro. Hello, drachma. The next 10 years are going to be uncomfortable for Greece. Not so much the rest of the Eurozone unless others follow suit.

return0 11y ago
Greek here. I don't see any other possible way out. People are currently celebrating for it, though.
- wavefunction 11y ago
  Perhaps better to fail under your own terms than those of someone else?
  - return0 11y ago
    Perhaps , we ll see . this is a lot more violent than an orderly exit.
- trhway 11y ago
  >People are currently celebrating for it, though. manipulating currency is one of the way how politicians, bankers and other people in power f&ck regular people. Obviously, being f&cked by your own instead of by foreign politicians/bankers is the more preferable situation. I'm not joking - just look at all the wars there foreign invaders were enthusiastically fought against by the regular people even when their own governing regime was nothing to fight for.
- BenjiBajing 11y ago
  What? The other way out would simply be to accept the reformations demanded by the EU. Greece would also need a new government as soon as possible. A government that does everything possible to help Greece to regain economic strength. Build new industrie, start-ups, let the tourism in this beautiful country flourish again. The EU has already agreed to give Greece a huge amount of additional money. But they obviously want to make sure that the money is not wasted and stolen by corruption as the hundreds of billions since 2010 [1]. History has proven that socialism doesn't work. You guys need another government, but only have a couple of pigs [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_government-debt_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_government-debt_crisis [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Farm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Farm
  - return0 11y ago
    That was the entire idea of the bailout packages from the start. However, the government still has strong support and not likely to change. At this point, it's fair to say greeks don't want to save themselves.

r721 11y ago

Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9833930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9833930

001sky 11y ago
why link to a discussion flagged of the front page?
- r721 11y ago
  For people to read the comments made earlier.

gruez 11y ago

Planet Money did a piece about the two options: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/07/01/419238213/episode-636-yes-or-no http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/07/01/419238213/episo...

Mikeb85 11y ago

Good. The conditions set by the troika were shit. Even though Greece's debt is significantly lower than 2010, their debt/GDP ratio is the highest it's been. Europe was trying to influence the referendum with their hard line (ie. blackmail Greece into accepting their shit deal), but they'll backpedal, and maybe Greece can get a deal that's actually sustainable, and doesn't lead to another 25% contraction in the economy.

hartator 11y ago
I don't see how the two main consitions of the treaty, having a VAT (sales tax) on the islands and moving retirement age from 60 to 65, were unsubtainable.
- Mikeb85 11y ago
  First of all, more VAT will decrease tourist dollars spend. It will decrease economic activity. Decrease GDP. Second, when you suddenly tell people who don't have a job (remember, unemployment is already high in Greece, especially among the youth) that they need to find one, it leads to a further strain on employment, and societal tension. And remember, pensioners spend money. The money may come from the government, but it goes into the economy. If this money isn't going back into the Greek economy, the GDP decreases. These measures will only increase unemployment and decrease GDP further. Exactly the opposite of what Greece needs. It may seem like a small thing, but on a macro scale, small changes add up.
  - hartator 11y ago
    I think it's fair for the islands to have the same level of taxation than the mainland. Greek islands shouldn't exist to be the gateway to tax evasion. Pensions are money taken from the working classes and the capital, it doen't magicaly create GDP. Again, it feels fair that a country way poorer per capita than the US or Germany should at least match their retirement age to those country. Corruption, red tape and over spending are the reasons why Greece is in bad shape.

pavlov 11y ago

As a European, I'm somewhat puzzled by why a Greek default has been out of the question. Why is it considered a huge threat to the euro, while in America, large public entities like Detroit and Puerto Rico can apparently default without endangering the USD? Is that just because dollar stands apart as a global currency? In a reasonable world, the parties who loaned Greece all that money for ridiculously low interest rates in 2000-2007 should have suffered the losses. They're the ones who miscalculated the risk, after all. But that ship sailed when the Euro countries bailed out most of that toxic debt with public funds. I just can't understand why. Merkel was in power back then, Tsipras wasn't. Hence I have some sympathy for him.

hartator 11y ago
Politics? Technicaly, they are already in default as they have missed payment to the IMF.
stevewepay 11y ago
It's never been out of the question. In the years that they have been kicking the can down the road, all of the EU financial institutions have been preparing for this exact thing. You can expect Greece to exit the euro with little to no effect. The euro will of course rise, because the caliber of the remaining countries are much stronger. The real issue is contagion. The EU doesn't want Italy or Spain to go down as well, because the markets/bond vigilantes love to pile on when there is blood in the water. Look at what happened during the Asian currency crisis, it was mass contagion throughout Asia that caused the subsequent problem.
- _delirium 11y ago
  That's also what, afaict, is keeping the problem from just being solved. Greece is small enough that it's quite possible to restructure their bonds into some workable package rather than kicking the can 6 months at a time. The IMF, for example, was floating a €50 billion debt haircut, which is not a ton of money in absolute terms. Alternate proposals would cap repayment in line with GDP, e.g. 1% of GDP per year, which would in effect amount to writing off a few tens of billion € per year (by letting it inflate away). But the EU is worried about setting a precedent that might impact a much bigger country with bigger debts, like Spain. (The other issue is just pure political constraints. Many EU countries currently have strong populist-right parties either in government or with an influential position in the government, like True Finns and Dansk Folkeparti. These parties are obviously against anything that looks like being "soft on Greece".)

noobie 11y ago

Can someone ELI5 this whole situation in Greece?

harel 11y ago
Roughly: Greek economy in bad shape, to put it mildly. Greece take loans from the IMF. Owes lots of money. Greece cannot pay it back. Will not pay it back. Deadline was a day or two ago to deliver a payment of over 1 billion euros (which again, i'm not sure why they are voting for/against a deal that has expired a day or two ago but... well....) Greece can now default on its payments, and as a result, leave the eurozone and the euro. Hello Drachmas. Allegedly Greece's entry into the euro zone was made possible by some banks fudging some numbers to make their economy look appealing while in reality it was already in dire straights. And here we are - the first country about to leave the EU. Hopefully this won't start a trend. I wish I could say "hopefully" with more conviction but I'm really not sure what is best any more. I guess I'm pro europe because I'm also a French national as well as British.
venomsnake 11y ago
German banks were stupid and lent money to Greece. 2008 Merkel saved German banks by moving Greek debt from private to public hands. They have been giving money to Greece just enough to cover the interest payments while pursuing a politics of austerity that devastated greek economy and employment. Greeks got fed up and elected government to end austerity. Merkel was stupid [expletive] and refused to give real deal on the table - one that must include basic debt relief. Tsipras got case of no balls and asked greeks to vote instead of just choosing to default. That's is.
cperciva 11y ago
Greece is like an orphaned child who really likes eating candy. Back in the 1990s, Greece was eating lots of candy, but it wanted to be adopted into a big and wealthy family, and the parents of that family had a rule that they would not adopt children who ate too much candy. Greece kept on eating lots of candy, but it made faces and pretended that some of the candy was actually vegetables; and because some of the other kids in the family had grown fond of Greece, the parents overlooked the continued candy-eating and officially adopted Greece in 2001. Now, it's sometimes difficult for orphaned children to get their hands on candy, but if you're part of a big and wealthy family, it becomes a lot easier. Just like most children would, Greece started eating a lot more candy. Greece's adopted parents also had rules about how much candy their kids could eat (not just rules for children they were considering adopting) but Greece wasn't the only child who was eating too much candy so they pretty much forgot about those rules for the moment. Then 2008 hit. Some children on the other side of the world started getting sick from eating too much candy, and immediately people started looking around at other children who were eating lots of candy and worrying about them. Greece, which was by this point very much overweight, came to the top of everybody's lists of children who had eaten too much candy. Suddenly nobody was willing to give Greece any more candy, and this made Greece very unhappy. So Greece turned to its adoptive parents and begged them to give it some more candy. While they had ignored Greece's growing waistline earlier, they had also gotten worried about it recently; so they offered Greece a deal: They would give Greece more candy -- not a lot, but enough that Greece could still feel slightly good about itself -- if Greece promised to go outside and get lots of exercise. This worked for a while, and by 2014 Greece was starting to lose weight; but it wasn't very happy with the situation -- Greece wanted to be playing Candy Crush, not running around outside. In January 2015 Greece finally rebelled and told its parents that it was sick of running around outside and wanted a new deal which would allow it to keep eating candy and to be allowed to keep playing Candy Crush. Greece's parents were not very impressed by this, and promptly told Greece that this was not acceptable, and Greece was not going to get any more candy if Greece didn't start doing as it was told. Today, Greece thought about this, answered back with a resounding NO, and slammed the door as it ran away from home. So what happens now? Well, Greece isn't going to be getting any more candy, for one thing. Greece is going to be hungry, but the only way it will be able to eat at all is if it goes out and works hard to get it -- which means it won't have much time to play Candy Crush either. Greece might change its mind and go back to its parents, but at this point they're pretty tired of Greece's rebelliousness and they're not likely to start handing out candy unless they see Greece start running laps first. All in all, Greece is in for a few unhappy years.

new_guy123 11y ago

How come they reversed the dots and commas?

thesimon 11y ago
Not all countries use the U.S. style
rhgraysonii 11y ago
There are many standards for decimal notation [0]. [0]. http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19455-01/806-0169/overview-9/index.html http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19455-01/806-0169/overview-9/inde...
WildUtah 11y ago
Lots of countries get dots and commas backward. [0] Lots of countries also drive on the wrong side [1], but the two seem to have no correlation. [0] http://www.statisticalconsultants.co.nz/blog/how-the-world-separates-its-decimals-m.html http://www.statisticalconsultants.co.nz/blog/how-the-world-s... [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-_and_left-hand_traffic https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-_and_left-hand_traffic

paglia_s 11y ago

Italian here. I think what Greece is going through in economics terms is terrible and the main objective of any deal should be to get the Greece economy to grow once again and I don't think that taxes are going to help. At the same time my country is exposed to Greece for ~40bn € and we did some reforms that nobody liked, like rising retirement age. We should be ready to help Greece but they have to make real reforms, they have their own responsability in their situation and according to what I read they have big problems collecting taxes, corruption and mispending of public funds. They have to make so that in a few years they won't need anymore money from other countries.