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A very brief history of debt will show you that, whenever in history countries have bowed to the demands of external creditors for reform, it never turned out w
by Daishiman 11y ago
A very brief history of debt will show you that, whenever in history countries have bowed to the demands of external creditors for reform, it never turned out well for them, and just another opportunity for predatory investors and foreign interests to get a hold of a country's internal policies for their own purposes.
Joseph Stiglitz, as chief economist of the World Bank, wrote a book on the matter on how the IMF's neoliberal policies of privatization functioned as a mechanism to give away national sovereignty and political power.
Do you understand that this transfer of fiscal sovereignty is not "temporary"? That the deals Greece makes now will be dependent on, literally, decades of compliance to reforms made now, under pain of the debt relief going away?
The Germans may be in the same political union, but they're not Greece's friends, and will never be. Alliances and pacts are always transitory. Giving away political power is a ludicruous proposition.
- Spooky23 11y agoThe real story here isn't Greece but Germany. What happens when the other spendthrift states refuse to tow the line? If the answer is a Lufthansa flight full of bean counters administering a nation like a receiver, that doesn't bode well for the future of the EU.
- marcosdumay 11y ago> whenever in history countries have bowed to the demands of external creditors for reform, it never turned out well for them It worked very well for Brazil at the 90's. And yes, those were IMF demands. They helped. Greece situation is different. But you can't generalize it either.
- Daishiman 11y agoAnd it didn't work in Africa. It didn't work in Argentina. The places where it's helped have been fewer, and the effect of failed policies has been substantially worse than the good effects of the successful policies.
- marcosdumay 11y agoIt worked mostly on countries that were in a stable situation, and could use some extra money for surviving while implementing some needed changes with severe short term costs. It could probably have worked in Argentina, but they didn't implement the changes. Like, it's a loan. If you invest it on something good, it can be great. If you just spend it away, it'll be a problem. If you take it because you have other loans you can not pay, it'll be a disaster.