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I am very pro Euro. But I don't like the fact that a single country in Europe feels that 18 other countries have to pay their debt. These bailouts in the past

I am very pro Euro. But I don't like the fact that a single country in Europe feels that 18 other countries have to pay their debt. These bailouts in the past were signed from the greece government in the best interest of its people. A lot of people make it seem that we (non-greece european) somewhat forced theses agreements onto greece. In fact these bailouts where were unpopular in Germany, because it cost us a lot of our money, we could have spent on infrastructure, education, etc. Therefore I would love Greece to give up the Euro currency and leave the European Union, so that these other 18 countries don't feel any obligation anymore to transfer more money to greece. I believe that Europe will be stronger that way. Because a vision of a truly united European Union can only be reached if all countries play by the same rules and abide to their agreements.

twobits 11y ago
You are not paying for greece. You (and all european tax payers) are paying for Deutsche Bank. Private debts were made public. You should ask Mrs. Merkel and Mr. Schauble, why you should pay for debts that were private.
mb_72 11y ago
Half-Australian and half-Estonian here; I can only agree with your sentiment. It seems to me that decades of corruption, tax avoidance and financial mismanagement is responsible for the position that Greece is in today, and I don't see why it is necessary for other countries to reward such behaviour with continued support and understanding. You don't like the terms of financial support offered by the EU? Well, maybe you should have thought about how your country has been run and realise that - sooner or later - that is going to cost you jobs and economic stability.
- gutnor 11y ago
  How much research did you do into all the fiscal decisions of the country you live in ? Are you even qualified enough to interpret the result at all ?It seems to me you are asking from the average Joe Greek more than professional actually did. Also "Greece" is not a single entity. Making Greece pay does not mean making the people that created the debt pay - it means taking the available money and you should know that "available money" is generally not rich people money. So yes, you are right that you do not want to reward such behaviour. Letting the actual responsible get away with it and punish somebody else is not the way to do it though.
  - monk_e_boy 11y ago
    Agreed, the people who mismanaged and/or stole the money in previous years are GONE. Why punish the average Joe in Greece? What will it achieve?
    - empressplay 11y ago
      The point of democracy is that the people appoint representatives to act on their behalf -- as such, the public is indeed fully responsible for what their politicians do, like it or not, whether an individual voted for them or not. There is no abdication of responsibility in a democracy and the Greeks should know that better than anyone.
      - gutnor 11y ago
        > There is no abdication of responsibility in a democracy and the Greeks should know that better than anyone. You get history sadly backward. The no abdication of responsibility is what dragged the world in 2 world wars and what Europe is supposed to fix.
      - monk_e_boy 11y ago
        I understand and don't know the specifics of how the average Greek voted, but here in the UK the government got in with less than 40% of the vote. > The point of democracy is that the people appoint representatives to act on their behalf in a perfect world, yes this should happen. But look around, the system isn't perfect. Look at america, money buys power. The money isn't evenly distributed. The system is broken.
      - cmavr8 11y ago
        The law that regulates elections in Greece is flawed (IMO). It assigns the percentages of small parties to the first one, to help it achieve majority in Parliament and be able to govern. This may sound wise, but motivates mainstream parties to not cooperate with smaller ones, and keeps minorities out of parliament. AFAIK there are countries (NL?) that traditionally could not elect self-contained governments so parties were forced to cooperate with other, which in turn created politics of accommodation. I think this is healthier than blocking minorities out of parliament. Syriza got elected with 36.3% back in January, while ~64% of Greeks voted. Also, what happens if a voter agrees with none of the choices (parties)? Is he responsible for what their government does? (Legally yes, that's democracy, but ethically he should be given the right to object) Oh, let's not forget that Greeks leaving outside Greece (some say we're another 10mil out here) were not given the chance to vote neither in the elections or referendum. We had to travel back to do so...
- nemik 11y ago
  So what do you think of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Agreement_on_German_External_Debts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Agreement_on_German_Ext... ? Perhaps everyone in Germany would be better off still re-paying that 50% that was just removed.
  - sbuk 11y ago
    Not even close to being the same thing.
atmosx 11y ago
> These bailouts in the past were signed from the greece government in the best interest of its people. What if a country destroys, literally, the entire continent killing around 80 million ppl, 70 years ago. What should we do with this country? Should show some solidarity and pardon it's debt or "abide to the rules" and ask them to pay their dues to all the countries they created damages?
- kedean 11y ago
  War reparations are in no way related to repeatedly breaking the terms of bailouts.
  - atmosx 11y ago
    There's no way any country in the world could keep up with troika's bailout terms given the damage these terms did to the economy. The IMF already noted that the "plan" was wrong. Every single forecast was out by a huge margin, what exactly more do we need to die? Stop breathing? WHat Varoufakis says is that we don't want money under terms the country can't honor, and the troika asks repeadetly for him to be removed. Maybe someone like Stournaras who signs any paper without asking questions would be more fit.
    - htns 11y ago
      The funny thing is that now we will see whether that was true.
- jwdunne 11y ago
  I haven't down voted you because this has been on the tip of my tongue but I've held it back because it's such a low-ball response which achieves nothing. I think this whole "look at X" is why we're in this chaos. We can point fingers this way ad infinitum but it's only served to keep the EU in stalemate over this issue.
  - atmosx 11y ago
    You're free to down-vote me, I don't care :-) I can assure no hard feelings about it... I had expressed many unpopular opinions on HN and had been downvoted many times, never held me back from expressing my views. What I'm saying is that solidarity towards Germany was key in 1945. Now it's time to make a Marshall plan for Greece that will bring 'justice' to the country, fix our tax-system, etc. Every Greek would welcome that sort of change even it came from abroad. The troika didn't do that at any point. It just sucked money from Greek tax-payers.
calibraxis 11y ago
Greece among others pardoned your Nazi debts and reparations in 1953, helping you rise. Greeks did nothing so terrible to "owe a debt". You owe them a debt which is far stronger than promises ("debt") held by investors, part of which was from the dictatorship and therefore odious debt. Piketty: "When I hear the Germans say that they maintain a very moral stance about debt and strongly believe that debts must be repaid, then I think: what a huge joke! Germany is the country that has never repaid its debts. It has no standing to lecture other nations.(https://medium.com/@gavinschalliol/thomas-piketty-germany-has-never-repaid-7b5e7add6fff https://medium.com/@gavinschalliol/thomas-piketty-germany-ha...)
- ssalazar 11y ago
  Pffff ridiculous. Can we starting calling this the Godwin's Law of economics? Economic policy intended to rebuild an entire continent after the most traumatic conflict in its history is necessarily going to differ from policy during times of peace.
  - twobits 11y ago
    So your solution is for greece to start WW3?
    - ssalazar 11y ago
      Ha. Is that a joke?
      - corin_ 11y ago
        Not him but if I were my answer would be: not just a joke but a rather clever comment about the logic behind the idea that Greece would be more deserving of debt-forgiveness if they started a war on top of the current situation.
- TheMagicHorsey 11y ago
  Greece must stop spending 50% of its GDP on bloated government bureaucracies. That is the bottom line. More money stops them from taking the hard steps. Greeks make nearly nothing that anybody wants, but they want the goods everyone else makes. They are not adjusting themselves to the realities of the modern world. You want cell phones, computers, cars, shoes, t-shirts, refrigerators ... all these things ... but you want to not actually make anything ... just sit at desks in secure government jobs doing nothing productive. This has to stop. But politically there is no will to stop it, because people there don't seem to understand that secure, easy jobs for life, where you don't make things, don't actually create wealth for the country. They think jobs are some thing where you just show up in the morning for work, do some paper shuffling and go home at night. And get your secure paycheck from government. How do we change this attitude? The same attitude is in India's public sector too. The way is you have to cut off the money faucet for the government. If the issue is poverty in Greece ... then let Europe provide basic needs for the Greek citizens as they reorganize the country. But feeding the Greek bureaucracy really shouldn't be done. Also continuing to perpetuate this attitude towards what employment is and what jobs are should also not be done.
tptacek 11y ago
I wonder what the EU expected. How is this morally different from the fact that most of the other 49 US states pay for the debts of Mississippi? If we hadn't been doing it on a long-term continual basis, and MS ran its own economy, we'd be talking about "bailing them out". But life support to MS is the long-term normal in the US economy.
- bodyfour 11y ago
  The main difference is that much of the US taxes are collected at the federal level with compliance enforced by a federal agency. European taxpayers aren't going to be willing to permanently transfer money to a country if they feel some of the government's problems are caused by widespread tax evasion.
- makeitsuckless 11y ago
  Does the term "sovereign nation" mean anything to you? Do you feel an obligation to pay for the debts of Greece? No? Then why would a German, or me as a Dutchman feel such an obligation?
  - tptacek 11y ago
    No, but then my country is not part of a decades-long effort to unify the continent it resides on under a single financial and regulatory regime; we finished doing that roughly 150 years ago. As a result, we don't have to "bail out" Mississippi so much as continually pay for its mismanagement. And so, again, isn't "paying for mismanagement" part of what you sign up for when you try to unify Europe?
    - michaelt 11y ago
      European politics is funny - EU treaties talk about "ever closer union" and the Euro was deliberately designed with no exit mechanisms; but at the same time politicians never talk about forming a "united states of europe" as it's deeply unpopular with voters. In other words, if you ask whether the EU aims for a single financial and regulatory regime the answer is "yes and no"
elorant 11y ago
So you have no problem with ECB spending at least one trillion to buy national bonds (including yours) but you do have a problem with writing off a portion of the Greek debt. And why exactly is that?
vidarh 11y ago
> In fact these bailouts where were unpopular in Germany, because it cost us a lot of our money, we could have spent on infrastructure, education, etc. You should have. It would have been better for Greece if the former Greek government had not been strongarmed into being the fall-guy for a rescue programme for French and German banks.
base 11y ago
"In fact these bailouts where were unpopular in Germany, because it cost us a lot of our money, we could have spent on infrastructure, education, etc." The money was provided as a loan, was not given for free, you even get a return on investment so that kind of comments are made by populist politicians and don't make any sense. https://medium.com/@gavinschalliol/thomas-piketty-germany-has-never-repaid-7b5e7add6fff https://medium.com/@gavinschalliol/thomas-piketty-germany-ha...
galfarragem 11y ago
I'm Portuguese but I completely agree with you. Greeks have chosen their path. Farewell Greece.
- pjmlp 11y ago
  Just wait until they come to us next. I bet we would have voted the same if given the opportunity.
- olifante 11y ago
  I'm Portuguese and I completely disapprove this message. We are deluding ourselves if we think that our situation is qualitatively much different from the Greek one. Were it not for Greece, Portugal would be the scapegoat for the Euro crisis. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I see that no one from the financial sector went to jail for recklessly causing the biggest worldwide financial crisis since 1929, yet everybody is happily demonizing the Greeks, who in spite of having a made several errors were in no way responsible for the global crisis. This shows how much journalism has been captured by financial interests, working hard to deflect attention from the true perpetrators.
codexjourneys 11y ago
The problem is that you aren't considering second-order effects. Is it better for Greece to give up the euro and return to the drachma? Quite possibly. Iceland successfully rebooted its economy after the financial crisis (with a lot of pain involved) because it was not tied to the euro. Of course, that required a huge amount of willpower and effort (which Greece has not shown yet). Is it better for the EU and the rest of the world for Greece to give up the euro and return to the drachma? Probably not. Why? Because it sets a precedent for giving up the euro and/or leaving the EU. Greece is a relatively small country, and the upheaval resulting from its financial recalibration could be fairly manageable. If Spain or Italy tries to go down the same road, it is a different story. Take a look: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-15748696 http://www.bbc.com/news/business-15748696 Italy owes France a LOT of money. France owes the UK a lot of money. The UK owes the US and Germany a lot of money. Greece, as you can see, is a drop in the bucket. It's the precedent that's important.
MaysonL 11y ago
Remember Germany's history of debt forgiveness and non-forgiveness. Don't know about it? Look at the treaty of Versailles, and John Maynard Keynes's polemic against it. Also look at the Marshall plan, and the debt forgiveness of 1953. And then consider how you want Greece to be treated. And consider how Portugal, Spain, Italy, France, and Germany should be treated when they run to big a deficit. Also read this post (unless you are extremely annoyed by vulgar language): http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/5965.html http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/5965.html

twobits 11y ago

You are not paying for greece. You (and all european tax payers) are paying for Deutsche Bank. Private debts were made public. You should ask Mrs. Merkel and Mr. Schauble, why you should pay for debts that were private.

mb_72 11y ago

Half-Australian and half-Estonian here; I can only agree with your sentiment. It seems to me that decades of corruption, tax avoidance and financial mismanagement is responsible for the position that Greece is in today, and I don't see why it is necessary for other countries to reward such behaviour with continued support and understanding. You don't like the terms of financial support offered by the EU? Well, maybe you should have thought about how your country has been run and realise that - sooner or later - that is going to cost you jobs and economic stability.

gutnor 11y ago
How much research did you do into all the fiscal decisions of the country you live in ? Are you even qualified enough to interpret the result at all ?It seems to me you are asking from the average Joe Greek more than professional actually did. Also "Greece" is not a single entity. Making Greece pay does not mean making the people that created the debt pay - it means taking the available money and you should know that "available money" is generally not rich people money. So yes, you are right that you do not want to reward such behaviour. Letting the actual responsible get away with it and punish somebody else is not the way to do it though.
- monk_e_boy 11y ago
  Agreed, the people who mismanaged and/or stole the money in previous years are GONE. Why punish the average Joe in Greece? What will it achieve?
  - empressplay 11y ago
    The point of democracy is that the people appoint representatives to act on their behalf -- as such, the public is indeed fully responsible for what their politicians do, like it or not, whether an individual voted for them or not. There is no abdication of responsibility in a democracy and the Greeks should know that better than anyone.
    - gutnor 11y ago
      > There is no abdication of responsibility in a democracy and the Greeks should know that better than anyone. You get history sadly backward. The no abdication of responsibility is what dragged the world in 2 world wars and what Europe is supposed to fix.
    - monk_e_boy 11y ago
      I understand and don't know the specifics of how the average Greek voted, but here in the UK the government got in with less than 40% of the vote. > The point of democracy is that the people appoint representatives to act on their behalf in a perfect world, yes this should happen. But look around, the system isn't perfect. Look at america, money buys power. The money isn't evenly distributed. The system is broken.
    - cmavr8 11y ago
      The law that regulates elections in Greece is flawed (IMO). It assigns the percentages of small parties to the first one, to help it achieve majority in Parliament and be able to govern. This may sound wise, but motivates mainstream parties to not cooperate with smaller ones, and keeps minorities out of parliament. AFAIK there are countries (NL?) that traditionally could not elect self-contained governments so parties were forced to cooperate with other, which in turn created politics of accommodation. I think this is healthier than blocking minorities out of parliament. Syriza got elected with 36.3% back in January, while ~64% of Greeks voted. Also, what happens if a voter agrees with none of the choices (parties)? Is he responsible for what their government does? (Legally yes, that's democracy, but ethically he should be given the right to object) Oh, let's not forget that Greeks leaving outside Greece (some say we're another 10mil out here) were not given the chance to vote neither in the elections or referendum. We had to travel back to do so...
nemik 11y ago
So what do you think of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Agreement_on_German_External_Debts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Agreement_on_German_Ext... ? Perhaps everyone in Germany would be better off still re-paying that 50% that was just removed.
- sbuk 11y ago
  Not even close to being the same thing.

atmosx 11y ago

> These bailouts in the past were signed from the greece government in the best interest of its people. What if a country destroys, literally, the entire continent killing around 80 million ppl, 70 years ago. What should we do with this country? Should show some solidarity and pardon it's debt or "abide to the rules" and ask them to pay their dues to all the countries they created damages?

kedean 11y ago
War reparations are in no way related to repeatedly breaking the terms of bailouts.
- atmosx 11y ago
  There's no way any country in the world could keep up with troika's bailout terms given the damage these terms did to the economy. The IMF already noted that the "plan" was wrong. Every single forecast was out by a huge margin, what exactly more do we need to die? Stop breathing? WHat Varoufakis says is that we don't want money under terms the country can't honor, and the troika asks repeadetly for him to be removed. Maybe someone like Stournaras who signs any paper without asking questions would be more fit.
  - htns 11y ago
    The funny thing is that now we will see whether that was true.
jwdunne 11y ago
I haven't down voted you because this has been on the tip of my tongue but I've held it back because it's such a low-ball response which achieves nothing. I think this whole "look at X" is why we're in this chaos. We can point fingers this way ad infinitum but it's only served to keep the EU in stalemate over this issue.
- atmosx 11y ago
  You're free to down-vote me, I don't care :-) I can assure no hard feelings about it... I had expressed many unpopular opinions on HN and had been downvoted many times, never held me back from expressing my views. What I'm saying is that solidarity towards Germany was key in 1945. Now it's time to make a Marshall plan for Greece that will bring 'justice' to the country, fix our tax-system, etc. Every Greek would welcome that sort of change even it came from abroad. The troika didn't do that at any point. It just sucked money from Greek tax-payers.

calibraxis 11y ago

Greece among others pardoned your Nazi debts and reparations in 1953, helping you rise. Greeks did nothing so terrible to "owe a debt". You owe them a debt which is far stronger than promises ("debt") held by investors, part of which was from the dictatorship and therefore odious debt. Piketty: "When I hear the Germans say that they maintain a very moral stance about debt and strongly believe that debts must be repaid, then I think: what a huge joke! Germany is the country that has never repaid its debts. It has no standing to lecture other nations.(https://medium.com/@gavinschalliol/thomas-piketty-germany-has-never-repaid-7b5e7add6fff https://medium.com/@gavinschalliol/thomas-piketty-germany-ha...)

ssalazar 11y ago
Pffff ridiculous. Can we starting calling this the Godwin's Law of economics? Economic policy intended to rebuild an entire continent after the most traumatic conflict in its history is necessarily going to differ from policy during times of peace.
- twobits 11y ago
  So your solution is for greece to start WW3?
  - ssalazar 11y ago
    Ha. Is that a joke?
    - corin_ 11y ago
      Not him but if I were my answer would be: not just a joke but a rather clever comment about the logic behind the idea that Greece would be more deserving of debt-forgiveness if they started a war on top of the current situation.
TheMagicHorsey 11y ago
Greece must stop spending 50% of its GDP on bloated government bureaucracies. That is the bottom line. More money stops them from taking the hard steps. Greeks make nearly nothing that anybody wants, but they want the goods everyone else makes. They are not adjusting themselves to the realities of the modern world. You want cell phones, computers, cars, shoes, t-shirts, refrigerators ... all these things ... but you want to not actually make anything ... just sit at desks in secure government jobs doing nothing productive. This has to stop. But politically there is no will to stop it, because people there don't seem to understand that secure, easy jobs for life, where you don't make things, don't actually create wealth for the country. They think jobs are some thing where you just show up in the morning for work, do some paper shuffling and go home at night. And get your secure paycheck from government. How do we change this attitude? The same attitude is in India's public sector too. The way is you have to cut off the money faucet for the government. If the issue is poverty in Greece ... then let Europe provide basic needs for the Greek citizens as they reorganize the country. But feeding the Greek bureaucracy really shouldn't be done. Also continuing to perpetuate this attitude towards what employment is and what jobs are should also not be done.

tptacek 11y ago

I wonder what the EU expected. How is this morally different from the fact that most of the other 49 US states pay for the debts of Mississippi? If we hadn't been doing it on a long-term continual basis, and MS ran its own economy, we'd be talking about "bailing them out". But life support to MS is the long-term normal in the US economy.

bodyfour 11y ago
The main difference is that much of the US taxes are collected at the federal level with compliance enforced by a federal agency. European taxpayers aren't going to be willing to permanently transfer money to a country if they feel some of the government's problems are caused by widespread tax evasion.
makeitsuckless 11y ago
Does the term "sovereign nation" mean anything to you? Do you feel an obligation to pay for the debts of Greece? No? Then why would a German, or me as a Dutchman feel such an obligation?
- tptacek 11y ago
  No, but then my country is not part of a decades-long effort to unify the continent it resides on under a single financial and regulatory regime; we finished doing that roughly 150 years ago. As a result, we don't have to "bail out" Mississippi so much as continually pay for its mismanagement. And so, again, isn't "paying for mismanagement" part of what you sign up for when you try to unify Europe?
  - michaelt 11y ago
    European politics is funny - EU treaties talk about "ever closer union" and the Euro was deliberately designed with no exit mechanisms; but at the same time politicians never talk about forming a "united states of europe" as it's deeply unpopular with voters. In other words, if you ask whether the EU aims for a single financial and regulatory regime the answer is "yes and no"

elorant 11y ago

So you have no problem with ECB spending at least one trillion to buy national bonds (including yours) but you do have a problem with writing off a portion of the Greek debt. And why exactly is that?

vidarh 11y ago

> In fact these bailouts where were unpopular in Germany, because it cost us a lot of our money, we could have spent on infrastructure, education, etc. You should have. It would have been better for Greece if the former Greek government had not been strongarmed into being the fall-guy for a rescue programme for French and German banks.

base 11y ago

"In fact these bailouts where were unpopular in Germany, because it cost us a lot of our money, we could have spent on infrastructure, education, etc." The money was provided as a loan, was not given for free, you even get a return on investment so that kind of comments are made by populist politicians and don't make any sense. https://medium.com/@gavinschalliol/thomas-piketty-germany-has-never-repaid-7b5e7add6fff https://medium.com/@gavinschalliol/thomas-piketty-germany-ha...

galfarragem 11y ago

I'm Portuguese but I completely agree with you. Greeks have chosen their path. Farewell Greece.

pjmlp 11y ago
Just wait until they come to us next. I bet we would have voted the same if given the opportunity.
olifante 11y ago
I'm Portuguese and I completely disapprove this message. We are deluding ourselves if we think that our situation is qualitatively much different from the Greek one. Were it not for Greece, Portugal would be the scapegoat for the Euro crisis. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I see that no one from the financial sector went to jail for recklessly causing the biggest worldwide financial crisis since 1929, yet everybody is happily demonizing the Greeks, who in spite of having a made several errors were in no way responsible for the global crisis. This shows how much journalism has been captured by financial interests, working hard to deflect attention from the true perpetrators.

codexjourneys 11y ago

The problem is that you aren't considering second-order effects. Is it better for Greece to give up the euro and return to the drachma? Quite possibly. Iceland successfully rebooted its economy after the financial crisis (with a lot of pain involved) because it was not tied to the euro. Of course, that required a huge amount of willpower and effort (which Greece has not shown yet). Is it better for the EU and the rest of the world for Greece to give up the euro and return to the drachma? Probably not. Why? Because it sets a precedent for giving up the euro and/or leaving the EU. Greece is a relatively small country, and the upheaval resulting from its financial recalibration could be fairly manageable. If Spain or Italy tries to go down the same road, it is a different story. Take a look: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-15748696 http://www.bbc.com/news/business-15748696 Italy owes France a LOT of money. France owes the UK a lot of money. The UK owes the US and Germany a lot of money. Greece, as you can see, is a drop in the bucket. It's the precedent that's important.

MaysonL 11y ago

Remember Germany's history of debt forgiveness and non-forgiveness. Don't know about it? Look at the treaty of Versailles, and John Maynard Keynes's polemic against it. Also look at the Marshall plan, and the debt forgiveness of 1953. And then consider how you want Greece to be treated. And consider how Portugal, Spain, Italy, France, and Germany should be treated when they run to big a deficit. Also read this post (unless you are extremely annoyed by vulgar language): http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/5965.html http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/5965.html