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Debt is fundamentally about morality. Otherwise everyone would accord Greece the agency to shrug and ignore it, like politicians break promises to consituents,
by calibraxis 11y ago
Debt is fundamentally about morality. Otherwise everyone would accord Greece the agency to shrug and ignore it, like politicians break promises to consituents, or big companies ignore their debts to smaller ones. Instead, children worldwide are condemned to misery ("austerity"), because of moral statements like "you have to pay your debts". Though they did nothing to deserve it.
As for Greece's finances, that's exactly what the negotiations are about. A political issue. (After all, money is a purely social construct, not some law of physics. Underlying it is power relations and violence.)
- tptacek 11y agoYou're dodging my point. Greece isn't simply arguing that, morality being relative and all, they've decided not to pay back their debts. They are demanding more money from their creditors. It seems like they have to: they're running a primary deficit; they're losing money even before you take debt service into account. Whatever the moral dimension of paying back their debt is has nothing to do with the question of whether Germany (ie, the EC) or the IMF (to whom Greece just defaulted) or the ECB (which doesn't want to be in this particular lending game to begin with) is going to give them more money. If Greece can't persuade the EC, IMF, or ECB to lend them more money, it's doesn't look like they can just walk away from this whole scenario. "Oh well! Debt is just politics and morality!" That might be true, but if they want to allow people to retire in their early 60s, or pay half the nominal tax rate, or not regressively tax the poor through punishing VAT increases, they're going to need to convince someone in the world of some kind of compatible morality, right? They require additional financing, don't they?
- twobits 11y agoNo, the greeks don't demand more money. They want to make the debt viable, in order to be able to pay it.
- tptacek 11y agoI don't understand. Aren't the terms the Greeks are negotiating over additional financing from the EC, ECB, and IMF?
- atmosx 11y agoHe has a point actually :-) Varoufakis does not accept the 7.2 billion of "aid" under current conditions because he believes that Greece has an insolvency problem and not a liquidity problem. The current hovernment wants to add at least 30% debt reatructuring (which Germany says it s off the table) and pay back only when reasonable primary surpluss has been achieved.
- abrezas 11y agogreece had primary surplus last year http://www.globalizedblog.com/2015/02/greeces-primary-surplus-was-smaller.html http://www.globalizedblog.com/2015/02/greeces-primary-surplu...