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It's a game of chicken right now, we'll see who blinks first
It's a game of chicken right now, we'll see who blinks first
barring an 11th hour rabbit pulled out of a hat, default and a Greek exit from the Euro look likely.
Greek default will be like Argentina default?
Vulture investors buying Greek bonds cheap and start suing Greece, impounding Greek ships?
I would bet (a small amount) on them staying.
They get to vote on it, because the prime minister wants a referendum.
Greek people get to decide, which is not exactly a bad thing, IMO.
the hedgefunds/loaners know the greeks have no ability to pay, so they bought into in and took out insurance
so who pays when the greeks default, insurance companies or the taxpayer...
German hegemony trumps all:
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/w...cle4484201.ece
Socialism
non paywalled version:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news...c34-1435804394
Germany wins. They're socialists too. So is the rest of Europe.
How does that figure in your scheme?
Paywall there too
well, ... if you're coming off Google search it shows it...
The text of the article is posted on this reddit thread:
https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comm...s_says_german/
But this is why Greece needs to give them the middle finger and forge their own road. What kind of democracy is this when you have outsiders telling you "we don't like your government, put somebody else in charge"...
And Germany better be very, very careful of what they're doing. There's no way they're not going to take a gigantic hit if they have to write off all that debt.
Ireland and Greece compared:
http://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/wh...thes-1.2267032Our current story is called, according to the Minister for Foreign Affairs Charlie Flanagan, “the pride of Europe”. Of course this doesn’t mean that Europe is proud that we’ve almost doubled consistent child poverty, or that we keep centenarians for days on hospital trollies or that basic services like clinics for sufferers of rheumatic diseases are simply disappearing or that we’ve been left with unpayable public debt.
It surely doesn’t mean that Europe is proud that little Ireland was forced to bear the cost of a bank bailout put last week by Patrick Honohan, governor of the Central Bank, at €100 billion and rising. At the level of reality, it doesn’t actually mean anything at all. But that doesn’t mean that it’s a harmless fiction. “The Pride of Europe” is a makey-up story that is intended to take the place of the realities it displaces. It’s not a stand-alone narrative. It has an evil twin: Greece. It belongs to a particular genre of fiction: the morality tale. Ireland is the pride of Europe because it is the anti-Greece. We are good because we play along with the bigger stories of the euro zone crisis. Greece is evil because it stopped doing so.
One of those stories is that the crisis had nothing to do with reckless lending (by, for example, German state banks) and was created purely by reckless borrowing. The other, even more fantastical, is that so-called austerity (in reality a programme of sucking citizens dry to transfer their resources to private banks) produces economic growth.
These stories are as patently false as Enda’s fairy tale, but Ireland is the pride of Europe because it has gone along with them and Greece is the shame of Europe because it has not been able to sustain the suspension of disbelief.
Greece’s membership of the euro zone was always a fiction - a story that everyone agreed to believe because it was more convenient than reality. Greece never met the fiscal criteria for membership. So how was it allowed in? By cooking the books. A right-wing Greek government worked with Goldman Sachs to hide its debts using massive currency swaps at fictional exchange rates. Euro zone governments went along with the story.
When the crisis hit in 2008, there might have been a moment of truth. Instead we had the classic dynamic of a lie spawning more lies. The banks that lent so recklessly were bailed out by transferring their debts to European taxpayers and the IMF – their culpability disappeared from the story. A new fiction was invented – that Greece could simultaneously have its economy shrunk by relentless austerity and pay back hundreds of billions of euro.
The startling thing about the current debacle is that no one really believes this story any more. The IMF has long since admitted that its calculations about the economic effects of austerity were wildly wrong. No objective analyst believes that Greece can pay back its debts.
And yet the story must be maintained: Greece must keep punishing its people to pay back the money being borrowed to make the payments on the unpayable loans. In the upside-down world we inhabit, Syriza, which has called a halt to this fiction, is a bunch of mad fantasists, while the troika that goes on acting as if the fictions were real is the voice of hard-headed realism.
In brief, like all the other countries, including USA, Iceland, etc, they were raped by the capitalist Banksters, who are escaping ALL responsibility, accountability.
Who is THEY?
The Greeks themselves participated at many levels.
Always ready to take the easy way if it fits your worldview.
really? how did "many levels" of Greeks themselves participate with Goldman-Sacks to hide national debt to present Greece fraudulently as an acceptable candidate for Euro integration?
You are describing the enslavement of joining the European Union
Americans laugh at Germany/UK saying it's an unfair one-sided relationship [will have to bailout Greece etc]. On the contrary those in Brussels have freely accomplished the equivalent of invading & occupying their fellow Europeans. Furthermore Germany is about to make a killing on imports.
This proves that the eurozone, European Union, and the euro are jokes.
Imagine if Europe brought in Russia, Belarus & Ukraine. Immense resources but would require incredible number of immigrants. Europe not willing to sell out.
Last edited by Infinite_limit; 07-03-2015 at 02:20 AM.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentis...over?CMP=fb_guSixty years ago today, an agreement was reached in London to cancel half of postwar Germany's debt. That cancellation, and the way it was done, was vital to the reconstruction of Europe from war. It stands in marked contrast to the suffering being inflicted on European people today in the name of debt.
Germany emerged from the second world war still owing debt that originated with the first world war: the reparations imposed on the country following the Versailles peace conference in 1919. Many, including John Maynard Keynes, argued that these unpayable debts and the economic policies they entailed led to the rise of the Nazis and the second world war.
By 1953, Germany also had debts based on reconstruction loans made immediately after the end of the second world war. Germany's creditors included Greece and Spain, Pakistan and Egypt, as well as the US, UK and France.
German debts were well below the levels seen in Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain today, making up around a quarter of national income. But even at this level, there was serious concern that debt payments would use up precious foreign currency earnings and endanger reconstruction.
Needing a strong West Germany as a bulwark against communism, the country's creditors came together in London and showed that they understood how you help a country that you want to recover from devastation. It showed they also understood that debt can never be seen as the responsibility of the debtor alone. Countries such as Greece willingly took part in a deal to help create a stable and prosperous western Europe, despite the war crimes that German occupiers had inflicted just a few years before.
The debt cancellation for Germany was swift, taking place in advance of an actual crisis. Germany was given large cancellation of 50% of its debt. The deal covered all debts, including those owed by the private sector and even individuals. It also covered all creditors. No one was allowed to "hold out" and extract greater profits than anyone else. Any problems would be dealt with by negotiations between equals rather than through sanctions or the imposition of undemocratic policies.
Perhaps the most innovative feature of the London agreement was a clause that said West Germany should only pay for debts out of its trade surplus, and any repayments were limited to 3% of exports earnings every year. This meant those countries that were owed debt had to buy West German exports in order to be paid. It meant West Germany would only pay from genuine earnings, without recourse to new loans. And it meant Germany's creditors had an interest in the country growing and its economy thriving.
The priority of an indebted government today is to repay its debts, whatever the amount of the budget these repayments consume. In contrast to the 3% limit on German debt payments, today the IMF and World Bank regard debt payments of up to 15-25% of export revenues as being "sustainable" for impoverished countries. The Greek government's foreign debt payments are around 30% of exports.
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