The left ascends to power in Greece, creating uncertainty and hope

Well, this will be interesting. I don't mind if they leave the euro. Have been to Greece many times. You see a lot of buildings and properties with signs that these were made possible through EU funding. Unfortunately, I think that they have huge problems with corruption and fraud. Even the whole country only got into the EU through fraud. There is too much of an attitude where tricking the state and stealing from it is seen as an achievement - and they certainly applied that attitude to their dealings with the EU and with loans from other countries. They will most probably manage to escape their responsibility for whatever they owe now...but once they are on their own, they must escape that attitude for their own good.

The left being in power now probably doesn't mean anything good for their economy in the longer run. The left being in power never does.

 

The sense of entitlement and ungratefulness by the deadbeat Greeks is remarkable.

There was a time when debtors were rightfully seen as degenerates. Now they riot in the streets, like a child sitting on the floor screaming in public when he doesn't get ice cream.

And then they issue threats, "if you don't take care of us, we won't be able to take care of ourselves, and that will be on your conscience."

Merkel should tell them to pound sand.

 

If Greece had defaulted in 2010 instead of listening to Stiglitz they wouldn't be in the mess they are in now. Instead, the past 5 years has only compounded the problem for Greece.

Greece should never have been part of the Euro currency.

 

How about "Thanks for tricking your way into the EU through fraud. Thanks for borrowing more than you already knew you would ever be able to pay back. Thanks for using state money and put it into everyone's own pockets."

How about taking some responsibility?

 

It's no different than the entitlement of the lenders. They kept buying Greek debt because they wanted to make higher returns. When it looked like Greek wouldn't pay, they begged the EU to bail them out and keep Greece afloat.

It's interesting to see the one-sidedness of the responsibility equation, as though lenders play no part.

 

You seem to think that a defaulting debtor has no responsibility whatsoever.

Can I borrow $ 1 million from you?

I promise to pay it back.

Thanks in advance.

 

This is an older article, but this Greek person (in a leftist newspaper, too), has a different take on this than you.

Greece's despair is the product of political ignorance
To save itself, Greece must realise that its crisis is the result of three decades of incompetence and corruption

Contrary to what outsiders may think, most Greeks do not spend their time throwing Molotov cocktails, or even protesting. In fact, though the austerity measures demanded by our international lenders have affected millions of lives, some hundreds of thousands of them dramatically, the great majority of Greeks face the crisis by doing what most people do during hard times: they try to make ends meet as best they can.

Yet this does not make good television, while militants in hoods and gas masks firebombing policemen does. So, many non-Greeks believe Greeks are not just lazy but also ungrateful and, probably, mad. None of these generalisations is true: most Greeks are hard-working people, the extremists who provide such great TV to the world number no more than a thousand, and the great majority of the demonstrations that daily disrupt Athenian life are only attended by a few hundred cadres of the parties or public-sector employees' unions organising them.

This is not say Greeks are happy with their situation. They are not. But though the hardships of many, especially the jobless, are undeniable, I believe our despair is more due to ignorance than anything else. In fact, though I generally subscribe to less optimistic explanations of human motivation, the present Greek crisis reminds me of Socrates's most-often quoted piece of wisdom: that all evil is due to a lack of knowledge. I can't help thinking that if only someone (old and bearded, ideally) could reveal the essence of our problem convincingly, then Greeks and non-Greeks alike would see the truth, and implement the actions necessary to solve our problems. For you cannot have good therapy without good diagnosis.

What makes ignorance particularly frustrating in this case is that the facts are at our fingertips. Let me give you one: although 750,000 people (15% of our workforce) have lost their jobs since the crisis began, not a single one is from the wider public sector, which employs one out of four Greeks.

The story behind this figure tells us all we need to know. First: what we call a crisis is the result of actions performed over decades. Second: its creator is an ineffective, incompetent and corrupt political establishment, which transformed politics into a mechanism for exchanging favours with votes, most of the former having the effect of making the state more ineffective and costly. Third: the critical point came when this mechanism became so ineffective and costly that it brought down the rest of the economy. Of course, the international financial situation, banks, speculators, crooks, etc played their part in making things worse. But they couldn't have done so if Greek politicians had not destroyed, over 30 years, the heart of our economy.

Today, politicians are bickering about who is doing more to save the country: the loan-signers, who are agreeing to more and more austerity measures, or the loan-deniers, proposing what they call a "nationally proud solution", a catchphrase that appears in various forms in the rhetoric of extreme right and extreme left alike. But both sides are denying a truth: the loan-signers that the reason more austerity measures are required is that they are unable and unwilling to cut public spending in rational ways; and the loan-deniers that their "proud solution" is a synonym for the indescribable misery of default. Both are lying for profit: the first to protect their clientelist networks, financed by public money, the second to drive Greece to the state of chaos and misery that forms the preferred habitat of extremist politics.

Actually, we don't need a bearded old man to tell us the truth about the crisis, but a little boy. For the statement that Greek politicians are to blame is as obvious as the emperor's nakedness in Hans Christian Andersen's famous fairytale.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/feb/20/greece-crisis-ignorance-protest-corruption

 

The euro was a catastrophic idea. If Greece was still on the Drachma, they could have addressed most of their structural problems with hyper inflation. Now they have no options because the EU won't let them do anything that will screw the euro for the other members.

 

Greece is the TMac of Europe?

 

If I agree to that, that is my fault. You seem to think the lender has no responsibility for making bad loans. No one was forced to invest in Greek debt.

 

Have you taken any finance classes? You will demand a higher return for taking more risk. If you want to less risk don't buy greek bonds.

 

Yes I have.

 

You are being a complete drama queen. Just because you implied that you are transgender or whatever doesn't mean you need to act like a hyper-PMSing woman all the time.