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Creditor's demands seem unreasonable from what I've seen.
Another socialist country going bankrupt:
http://www.cnbc.com/id/102767018Some officials believe Thursday's meeting of euro zone finance ministers will be perhaps the last chance to stop Greece sliding into default and towards leaving the euro.
However the president of the so-called Eurogroup, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, said the chance of an accord was "very small".
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/...0OX0SR20150617Athens must find a way out of the impasse by the end of June, when it faces a 1.6 billion euro ($1.8 billion) repayment due to the International Monetary Fund, potentially leaving it bankrupt and on the verge of exiting the euro zone.
"People are getting anxious on both sides. Athens expects Brussels to move. And Brussels expects Athens to move. And it's stuck," said a senior EU diplomat, who declined to be named.
"It's very dangerous, and we may have an accident."
http://www.bankofgreece.gr/Pages/en/...5&Filter_by=DTAll this would imply deep recession, a dramatic decline in income levels, an exponential rise in unemployment and a collapse of all that the Greek economy has achieved over the years of its EU, and especially its euro area, membership. From its position as a core member of Europe, Greece would see itself relegated to the rank of a poor country in the European South.
Creditor's demands seem unreasonable from what I've seen.
Explain
I've heard the cuts they wanted to make in already pretty modest pensions for example, and they were really quite steep. I can't see any Greek government agreeing to them as is.
Wrong.
The Socialists just lied to the Greeks about getting them out of the debt mess.
Capitalism run amok along with big companies completely buying out Greek politicians is what did them in.
They have more than enough money to pay off that debt right now if they could get taxes Owed from all their big businessmen and the corrupt politicians they bought. Both are hiding their money in Swiss banks.
On a side note Unions also bought politicians, but not close to the extent big business did. All this corruption by big business imposed on corrupt officials finally caught up with them. This has been going on for a very long time. 2007 they got a massive warning shot across the bow and unlike other European countries they did not follow thru with a prescription that fit them, COLLECT taxes, especially from all the big and smaller businessmen that never paid them. 30 billion Euros. The debt due, about 1.7 billion...
And who wants to get rid of the IRS?
Last edited by pgardn; 06-18-2015 at 09:49 PM.
Predatory, corrupts CAPITALISTS Goldman-SACKS showed Greece how to hide debt off the books so Greece could keep defrauding lenders and getting a lower interest rate, and keep getting further and further into debt. Greece's debt is only there because CAPITALISTS kept lending them money way beyond reason. Greece is no more corrupt than USA.
BS
They made their own bed. Greek greed and an endemic corrupt way of doing business. They made half-hearted attempts to change things. You constantly attempt to fit your tired theme to every worldwide financial crisis. Just stop it.
No more corrupt than the U.S.?
BS
You have no idea how bad corruption can get because you live in the U.S.
it's possible both that the Greeks are wrong to blame all their problems on foreign interference and that the EU bollixed things up more than it has helped,
http://www.ekathimerini.com/4dcgi/_w...06/2015_551127
from Varoufakis's speech to the Eurogroup. More austerity sounds like a tall order, politically:
http://yanisvaroufakis.eu/2015/06/18...ays-eurogroup/That Greece needs to adjust there is no doubt. The question, however, is not how much adjustment Greece needs to make. It is, rather, what kind of adjustment. If by ‘adjustment’ we mean fiscal consolidation, wage and pension cuts, and tax rate increases, it is clear we have done more of that than any other country in peacetime.
- The public sector’s structural, or cyclically adjusted, fiscal deficit turned into a surplus on the back of a ‘world record beating’ 20% adjustment
- Wages fell by 37%
- Pensions were reduced by up to 48%
- State employment diminished by 30%
- Consumer spending was curtailed by 33%
- Even the nation’s chronic current account deficit dropped by 16%.
No one can say that Greece has not adjusted to its new, post-2008, cir stances. But what we can say is that gigantic adjustment, whether necessary or not, has produced more problems than it solved:
- Aggregate real GDP fell by 27% while nominal GDP continued to fall quarter-in-quarter-out for 18 quarters non-stop to this day
Unemployment skyrocketed to 27%
- Undeclared labour reached 34%
- Banks are labouring under non-performing loans that exceed 40% in value
- Public debt has exceeded 180% of GDP
- Young well-qualified people are abandoning Greece in droves
- Poverty, hunger and energy deprivation have registered increases usually associated with a state at war
- Investment in productive capacity has evaporated.
It does indeed.
If one looks at their endemic tax evasion and fiscal irresponsibility the problem seems clear but entrenched. They refused offers by the Germans to help advise on tax collection. They made half hearted attempts to shame some of the wealthiest evaders in the papers. The current government is playing chicken with a train.
They are are in a situation in the making over many years.
how is Greece "socialist", on the improbable assumption that a Clipper fan knows what socialism is?
The in bent party at the time of the crash was socially democratic and big on capitalism, clearly not socialist. Conservatism has never failed, right? I mean just look at all that wealth equali-oh.
You do realize that Greece crashed because their socialist welfare state collapsed under its own weight and became unaffordable, right? At the time of the crash, less than 50% of the population worked for a living, and 42% of government spending went to en lements alone. Socialism is nothing but a one-way trip to bankruptcy.
Capitalism
The Free Market
Ludwig von Mises
You pick and choose with your facts don't you? So the welfare state was the exact reason and entirely why Greece is how it is now?
Ok. Do you.
Greece has always been a very poor country.
No natural resources, very little arable land.
After WWII, the CAPITALIST USA/CIA setup and supported a Greek military dictatorship, which naturally, as always, was corrupt, hated by the people (who minimized their cooperation) and lasted for 20 years. The corruption of tax avoidance, tax evasion, govt corruption, underground/cash economy (untaxed) starved the govt of tax revenues, NOT SOCIALIST governance.
your adored "free market" in USA is myth, where the actual market is a coporatocracy compromising govt for the enrichment, protection, enabling of the VRWC, BigCorp, 1%, and which has produced World Champion inequality and a work force, impoverished, enslaved, under-privileged like no other in industrial economies which are SOCIAL democracies.
the beauty of placing all your chips on philosophical abstractions is never having to descend to details.
Greece needs to give them the middle finger, move to it's own currency and be a sovereign country again. The people of Greece elected their government to make policy decisions and run the country, not the IMF or the Eurobank.
They'll take a hit now, but they'll be better in the long run.
This is like that article about the NYT guy who purposefully defaulted on his student loans.
Greek politicians knew the terms of their arrangements with the IMF and the EU/ECB. It's on the Greeks to live up to those terms -- not the financial ins utions keeping the country afloat.
Greece is really going broke because the rich don't pay taxes
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/wo...anted=all&_r=0That kind of wholesale lying about assets, and other eye-popping cases that are surfacing in the news media here, points to the staggering breadth of tax dodging that has long been a way of life here.
Such evasion has played a significant role in Greece’s debt crisis, and as the country struggles to get its financial house in order, it is going after tax cheats as never before.
Various studies, including one by the Federation of Greek Industries last year, have estimated that the government may be losing as much as $30 billion a year to tax evasion — a figure that would have gone a long way to solving its debt problems.
...
Experts point out that ducking taxes is part of a broader culture of bribery and corruption that is deeply entrenched.
...
The cheating is often quite bold. When tax authorities recently surveyed the returns of 150 doctors with offices in the trendy Athens neighborhood of Kolonaki, where Prada and Chanel stores can be found, more than half had claimed an income of less than $40,000. Thirty-four of them claimed less than $13,300, a figure that exempted them from paying any taxes at all.
"Greece is really going broke because the rich don't pay taxes"
identical problem in USA
A report this week showed Walmart to have bank accounts in countries where it doesn't have stores
Walmart Uses 22 S Companies to Hide an Incredible Amount of Money in Luxembourg
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2015/06/walmart-tax-evasion-luxembourg
Ending Greece’s Nightmare by Krugman
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/26/op...=c-column-top-You see, the economic projections that accompanied the standby arrangement assumed that Greece could impose harsh austerity with little effect on growth and employment. Greece was already in recession when the deal was reached, but the projections assumed that this downturn would end soon — that there would be only a small contraction in 2011, and that by 2012 Greece would be recovering. Unemployment, the projections conceded, would rise substantially, from 9.4 percent in 2009 to almost 15 percent in 2012, but would then begin coming down fairly quickly.
What actually transpired was an economic and human nightmare. . .
Why were the original projections so wildly overoptimistic? As I said, because supposedly hardheaded officials were in reality engaged in fantasy economics. Both the European Commission and the European Central Bank decided to believe in the confidence fairy — that is, to claim that the direct job-destroying effects of spending cuts would be more than made up for by a surge in private-sector optimism. The I.M.F. was more cautious, but it nonetheless grossly underestimated the damage austerity would do.
span-region
And from the New York Times:
'The moneyed elites’ aversion to paying taxes must be brought to an end, along with the corruption, nepotism and cronyism in government. Opposing austerity does not mean abandoning reform as a group of prominent economists wrote recently in The Financial Times.'
There's no bankruptcy in sovereign debt. We're well past the Greeks living up to the terms, it didn't happen for whatever reason. Different political parties have been in control over this period.
They're already treated like deadbeats, and getting more loans to pay previous loans is only gonna get them deeper in the hole.
Maybe it's time to blow it up and start over with the lenders... and let the chips fall where they may...
What's Going On In Greece?
http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/gaiu...g-on-in-greeceWhich is where we are today. The only country listed above not to be starved into submission was Iceland, who kicked the bankers out in a national election some time ago and forced debt-holders to eat the debt. Greece, on the other hand, tried to repair itself on terms good for the debt-holders, and it's being eaten. Syriza has a (belated) opportunity to correct that error, though as Ian Welsh points out, much of the damaging privatization has already been done. (Did you know that selling off, "privatizing," the ancient Athenian port of Piraeus was part of the austerity demands? Piraeus was a Greek port before Socrates was born.)
As Krugman points out in his conclusion, the Syriza solution may not be radical enough to produce a real recovery from depression, and it's unlikely that Greece will exit the euro soon — the ultimate, though painful, solution, in my opinion.
Never said anything about bankruptcy -- just that they knew what they were getting in to, so I have 0 sympathy for them complaining aboutmean creditors
I go back and forth on letting them default. I dunno if the short term impact would outweigh long term benefits.
Agreed. That said, in practice, the whole sovereign debt gone sour thing quickly turns into policy control, which is where I think the whole "mean creditors" thing comes from.Never said anything about bankruptcy -- just that they knew what they were getting in to, so I have 0 sympathy for them complaining about
I go back and forth on letting them default. I dunno if the short term impact would outweigh long term benefits.
And frankly, the IMF has a terrible track record of helping countries get out of debt.
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