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Journalist Arrested In Greece For Publishing List of Possible Tax-Evaders
kyriacos writes "The Greek government is charging journalist Kostas Vaxevanis with violation of the data privacy law for publishing a list of about 2,000 Greeks who hold accounts with the HSBC bank in Switzerland. While more and more austerity measures are being taken against the people of Greece, there is still no investigation of tax evasion for the people on this list by the government. The list has been in the possession of the Greek government since 2010."
Yes everybody pull your money out because that will make it better.
The difference between a Swiss bank and a bank in another European country is that Swiss banks don't share information about the account balance with the governments of their respective clients. So while having a Swiss bank account doesn't necessarily mean someone is evading taxes, the vast majority of the people evading taxes will use Swiss bank accounts.
That's not the real scandal, or should I say is part of it. The real scandal is that the list has been in the government's hands for a couple of years and it has done nothing about it
In other words, the second and third sentences in the summary:
"While more and more austerity measures are being taken against the people of Greece, there is still no investigation of tax evasion for the people on this list by the government. The list has been in the possession of the Greek government since 2010."
Actually getting out of the Euro would probably be a smart thing, as they will frankly NEVER be able to pay back the loans and most likely the people will revolt over the measures being imposed on them in return for the loans.
Whether you agree or disagree with the direction Greece is headed you simply can't force the people to accept what essentially was a crooked deal between the large banks like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs (Why am I not surprised that GS was involved? I swear they are Wolfram & Hart, and I wouldn't be shocked if their board was demons in Gucci suits) and the former government.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The irony about gold is that the current high price is the result of an artificial bubble maintained by gold sellers pushing the staying power of gold. You didn't think those advertisements telling you to buy gold were for your own good, did you? No, they are to drive the price of gold high and keep it that way.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
This is a classic case of government panicking when they lose control of information and thus power. I find when a government spends too much time controlling information they tend to forget what they are actually supposed to be doing. I love how this compares to a functioning government like Norway where you can access people's tax records online. There are a few odd rules though; there is a time window and I believe that people know who has accessed their records. Thus the open information includes knowing which of your neighbours are nosy. But the best part is the first year they went online the public found famous rich people claiming $150,000 in income resulting in investigations.
The ads are to hold the price up long enough for the early purchasers to convert to dollars.
There is a legitimate point that inflation is what Greece, Spain, Italy and Portual need. Now ideally they would get there from a eurozone inflation of target of 4% and ease through this gradually (as the US generally has), but the other option will be for the Eurozone to break up, and they would likely be first to be kicked out (unless the germans leave first, which would help too).
Inflation devalues debt. Since one persons debt is anothers holding you can see the issue. But of course most people don't have a lot of money in cash assets. They have houses and stocks and so on.
Rightly, what he's complaining about is that reducing the value of a currency can make your labour worth less. This is true, and tied in concept to something in economics called nominal wage rigidity. Basically no one wants to take a face value pay cut. So to make your economy more competitive (more exports, more tourists, less imports, less of your people touring elsewhere) you want to reduce your own costs, and one way to do that is inflation.
Greece is essentially a balance of payments problem, all of the euro area is, combined with a monetary but not a fiscal union. If it wasn't for defence, medicare and medicaid and social security being *federal* in the US a lot of states would be in deep trouble right now. But because relatively rich areas keep sending money to poorer areas (especially areas that are poor because of the housing bubble and the now market bubble). What the greeks need is to decrease their costs relative to germany to attract investment, or get direct payments from germany. Either would work. The first, when in the Euro, is a mess, the Euro area could aim for a larger inflation target, essentially they'd decrease costs against everyone else at least, Greece might not be more competitive against germany but it would at least be more competitive against the US and Japan and China. The latter, which is essentially what the germans are talking about, European Federalism, seems to be a non starter politically.
So sure, he's shilling gold, and gold isn't a hedge against anything, it's just a metal that varies wildly in price, in part based on fears about inflation. Small persistent inflation (fiat currencies trend down) is a feature, not a defect of the system. But there's a kernel of truth to the fact that a lot of people in europe are looking at greece and figuring they want to having their money somewhere else, because if the Euro area starts kicking people out rather than actually solving problems a lot of people are going to get really fucked in the short term, and there they really might be better with bars of metal than cash. Incidentally, as other people have pointed out, this reality is why the barter system is picked back up, and is preventing major investment, so between that and austerity greece is only going to get worse unless there's some serious credible move towards an actual european solution, and given that, bars of any metal, even iron might be better than Greece Euros.
... and believe it's some moral failure of the greeks in not paying their debts which has nothing to do with reality
not that i am a fan of further unification; care to elaborate how it's not a failure of the greeks? Who took those massive debts and spent everything on hookers and blow? Martians? Oh, those evul bureaucrats in government who schemed with foreign bankers and cheated the honest uncorrupted greek society... but who voted for them? Santa Claus?
Did they expect to load on debt ad infinitum to fund lavish welfare programs without any consequences?
Their taxes as a % of gdp and spending as a % of GDP were not radically different from the rest of the euro area for the last decade
so i guess you missed the fact they had no problem with lying their way into the monetary union, cooking the books every single year, marking everything to fantasy and doing that shady credit default swap business with GS to move shitton of expenses off the balance sheet. Yup, everything would be rainbows and ponies if only zee germans left them alone.