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

ESL

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_as_a_second_or_foreign_language

 

After sifting through the poo flinging, just wanted to give props to Northside for the most informative post of the thread.

 

other than romania under ceausescu, has any nation or empire in history ever paid back all its debt? props to anyone here who can cite any such instance..

 

I doubt you have any appreciable concern for Liberian kids either, but the suffering of Greek kids is enough to be a major concern for many other folks.

Interesting that even you sort of acknowledge your bias on the issue.

You are getting a bit closer to understanding who should pay back the loans-- German and other international banking types like Goldman who cooked the books and enabling fraudulent loans to Greece. Much like the banksters who made fraudulent mortgages in the US and profited off them. Just like in the US these are the types who should pay and not the hard working ordinary people of Greece, or for that matter those in Germany, Holland, Finland etc. It is the banks and the Euro elite who profited from the bogus loans that should take the loss.

You are just wrong here and uninformed. The Greek welfare state is much below that of Northern Europe and probably even the US. For instance only 10% of Greek workers get unemployment benefits.

Here you are blaming some of the right people, but don't forget to add rich northern Euro bankers and oligarchs who profited off the loans buying up Greek Island property, Spanish condos and stash the money they made on Greek loans they knew were fraudulent in international tax havens.

You sort of get it.

Well we do see the rise of neo-Nazism arising in Germany which your Islamaphobia feeds into. However, real fascists are arising in Greece due to the suffering.

Perhaps a lesson from German fascism after WW I and the rise of fascism not just caused by German Christianity or anti-semitism that perhaps you would say, but needless imposed austerity in order to extract of funds to pay foreign claims.

In this case neither the innocent workers of Greece, Germany, Holland etc should be on the hook for the fraudulent loans of the banking elite.

 

Defaulting country wide debt happens all the time, and anyone that thought it was not a possibility here, or a probability was being naive, IMO.

DD

 

I'm not sure what this has to do with the price of tea in China or with this thread, but yes.

 

To be accurate, I'm a proponent of the "icky sticky" (among other things) being regulated rather than prohibited.

http://bbs.clutchfans.net/showthread.php?t=63243

 

New Greek government getting right to the business at hand

Greece says No to EU statement on Russia

The EU statement on Russia, published on Tuesday morning, claimed all 28 leaders had agreed Russia bears “responsibility” for a rocket attack on the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, which killed 30 people.

https://euobserver.com/foreign/127393

 

So I suppose you want an invasion of Greece or some drones or art least a blockade or crippling sanctions to make kids suffer so rthat they might want to overthrow their newly elected democratic government?

 

Things are going to be nasty in Greece for the next decade.... I would not want to be there right now.

 

I'm surprised they didn't vote to repeal Obamacare again.

 

Is Russian murdering of Ukrainian kids just blowback for losing the Cold War?

 

So only them Ruskkies are murdering kids in the conflict. The other side's bombs aresafe for kids. Software pack?

The Ukraine mess is blowback for the U.S. refusing to stop the Cold War once it was over as they were afraid of peace dividend might affect the military industrial complex

Another theory that seems plausible is that the USA was determined to drive a wedge between Europe and Russia so as to keep trying to control the world -- an unhealthy obsession.

 

How is Iceland doing after it's reset?

DD

 

I would, out on one of the islands. I seriously doubt that they are as affected by the economic mess as the urban areas on the mainland.

 

Except in non-recourse debt, that's really not the case. Greece's responsibility is to the people of Greece. Selling debt is to serve the people. Paying debt is to serve the people. If not paying that debt is in the best interests of the country, then that is their core responsibility.

Lenders know that when they buy government debt and they charge an interest rate taking into account the risk of default. Everyone knows that default is a possible outcome. Since countries have no legal obligation to pay their debt and there is no recourse if they don't, the debt markets are structured to make it in everyone's best interests that they pay. The US doesn't pay its debt because it has to. It does so in order to keep borrowing and to keep the dollar as the world's currency reserve. Similarly, Greece pays only because it benefits them.

Greece has have moral responsibility to their lenders, but they do have a moral responsibility to the people of Greece to do what is best for them. At this point, it may no longer benefit Greece to pay their debt. If that's the case, the responsible thing to do is to do a strategic default. It would be different if this possibility was not part of the pricing or a viable outcome. But it was - the reason people bought Greek debt over German debt is because they got higher interest rates in exchange for higher risk. If there was no risk and default was not a viable option (ie Greek debt was as safe as German debt), that spread would not exist.

Lenders were greedy; Greece was greedy; the whole thing failed. Lenders pay the price - no different than any other lender that loses when they bet on an individual or business that fails.

 

ZERO responsibility on Greece to pay back a debt brought about by the EU befriending the very people who put Greece in trouble in the first place. The old government made the deal to benefit the ultra elite knowing full well the people would get F'ed down the road.

It can be argued that Greece's debt was imposed on them under severe duress and I'm sure our resident xenophobic constitutional lawyer knows exactly what that means for the validity of the contract. The fact that Greece is willing to sit down and negotiate a different repayment schedule is out of unnecessary courtesy.

 

This is true. Good legal analysis.

Greece's best bet is probably to just withdraw from the EC if the EC refused to do what is necessary.

Aside from loaning Greece more money it cannot afford to pay back I am not sure what they get out of the EC as the Germans envision it.

It will be interesting to see who blinks first. Both sides think they have winning hands. The EC does not think Greece will leave the EC.

 

So what is in the best interest of the people of the lenders' countries? Just piss money away so that people whose (elected) governments have been completely irresponsible for decades have it better? Who asked the people of Germany or France whether they agreed with giving loans to countries which were obviously embezzling the money? Or giving up on hundreds of billions of dollars (or Euros) in favor of these countries/borrowers/people? Explain to the hard-working German factory worker that his (very high) tax money goes into funding huge pension schemes in Greece? Do you think that goes over well? Where is your social justice in this? In Greece, the whole population makes it a sport to defraud the state wherever they can (yes, broad brush, etc.). In Germany, people stop in the middle of the night if there is a red light for a pedestrian on a deserted street. Explain to those law-abiding Germans that their hard-earned tax dollars (or Euros) go into funding Greeks who made it a sport to get pension funds for several dead relatives. Explain that to a simple German factory worker that stops at night at a red light for pedestrians! Then tell him he cannot go to the streets to demonstrate against that!

Again, since Northside Intern - who is trying to come off as really knowledgable here after frantic googling and apparently has convinced Kim of that already, which is pretty laughable - has said that "people are not the government" - what do the German people (factory workers) know as "lenders"? Why would you make them responsible? They didn't elect the corrupt Greek government! "Lenders know" - it's German (and French, etc.) tax payer money! The tax payers didn't know crap. They sure didn't know that it's a sport in Greece to claim pension benefits for deceased relatives (see above). They certainly didn't know anything about the risk of default or whatever. They work hard and see their taxes being funneled into a country that is corrupt from the core: They defrauded their way into the European union, it's a national sport to defraud the state, and certainly, the moral barrier to defrauding the EU instead of their own government is even lower.

Yes, but Greece doesn't. They already got hundreds of billions of US $ (and Euros) off, and they are basically saying "F'ck you, we are not paying the rest, either - we are going to pay more of our bloated state apparatus instead, and you better pay for it." Can you not see how this makes the hard-working German factory worker angry?

Yes, and the German government has a moral responsibility to the hard-working German factory worker to do what's best for him. And that is that Greece, an overall very corrupt country, repays the debt they took out, or at least part of it (much of it has already been forgiven anyway).

Yes, that's a very one-sided view. If you are the debtor, the "responsible thing to do" is always to do a "strategic default". If you are the one who has to pay, yeah - the "responsible thing to do" for your children is to not pay because then your children end up being better off because you can buy them stuff. But what about the children of those who gave you the money? Do you think they didn't work for the money?

Again - I can turn Northside Intern's argument back 100 %: Just as much as borrowers' people aren't borrowers' government, lenders' people aren't lenders' government. The hard-working German factory worker who always paid his taxes has more of a right to getting his money back as the not hard-working Greek olive farmer who sits in the sun all day has a right to not repay the loan his government took out for him.

 

Perhaps the hard working German factory workers should also place some blame on the greedy, rule-skirting GERMAN banks who were knowingly pouring more money than they were supposed to into risky Greek bonds.