Slashdot Mirror
Greece Rejects EU Terms
New submitter Thammuz writes: With almost all ballots counted, Greeks voted overwhelmingly "No" on Sunday in a bailout referendum, defying warnings from the EU that rejecting new austerity terms would set their country on a path out of the euro. Figures published by the interior ministry showed nearly 62% of those whose ballots had been counted voting "No", against 38% voting "Yes". "Today we celebrate the victory of democracy, but tomorrow all together we continue and complete a national effort for exiting this crisis," Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said in a televised address.
One size doesn't fit all, so it should come as no surprise that a currency made for industrial nations doesn't work so well for a tourist economy.
I am Belgian. Greece owes me, my wife and children over 3000 euro. We fronted it out of our taxes and if they don't pay us back, we'll pay it back out of our taxes. Now, I am all for social solidarity... anybody who has spent time here in Belgium knows how easy it is for an IT worker to do independent contracts under the table. I declare all of my side activities and pay my taxes specifically because I believe in helping those who are down on their luck.
But solidarity is a two-way street. Greece was bailed out once, in 2010, in exchange for reforms. They were slow in reforming and in 2012 we had to bail them out again... and they still haven't reformed and here we are in 2015 and they want more money. The reforms that our governments are asking are not onerous. It basically comes down to "don't spend more than you can pay". The Greeks for some reason seem to think that the rest of the Eurozone should pay for armies of useless bureaucrats and pensioners whose median pensions are higher than ours make more than my parents. Now, Greece is small and strategically important, so maybe every Belgian should just give them 600 euro and call it a day.
But then Podemos in Spain will be asking for the same thing. Then the Five star movement in Italy will want their free money. I'm sorry, but fuck you guys. I work my fucking ass off to support my family and my countrymen. Greece threw my good will in my face. They can go become lackeys to the Russians for all I care, fight a civil war, I don't care. I hope my government refuses to give them another cent.
Well goody for Greece where a majority thinks that that they can vote themselves out of responsibility for borrowing themselves into a hole. Now it's the turn of everyone else in Europe to decide whether to continue throwing good money after bad. The Greeks claim that the banks & everyone else are the problem. We'll soon see how well they do without either.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
Citizen of Belgium here. That is totally cool with me. Please pay back the 660 euro per person that you owe us on your way out, though (in Euro, not Drachma)
Now they seem to be wanting a 30% discount on their debt. Funny that!
You give up now the 30%, and tomorrow they will put together another act like this to have another 30% cut.
Never negotiate with Debt Terrorists!
There are rules to be in the Euro zone. Nobody forced anybody to accept those rules.
If Greeks now they finally came to reality that retiring at 50yo might lead to shortage of pension funds, and they want "discounts", they should be booted out of EU.
Greece is screwed either way. We can argue about blame all day (and there's plenty to go around) but Greece is not Iceland. They keep voting for more bread and circuses and then collectively refusing to pay taxes for it. If they go back to the Drachma, the government isn't going to suddenly get their shit together and fix the country's problems. They'll just end up printing more and more money and drive the inflation levels out of control.
It doesn't help that Greece was forced into an austerity plan in their last bailout. Essentially that kicked off a death spiral. Austerity has already been well discredited (see here, here, and here. Original paper here) yet it keeps being foisted off on citizens everywhere.
I'm not suggesting that Greece should spend money like a drunken sailor on leave, but following a faith based economic theory even after it has been disproven (even to the satisfaction of the writers of the original paper) is not the answer.
All EU citizens should demand a referendum asking if the taxpayers should pay this 'debt' created by derivatives and fraudulent market trading, or tell the bankers to write it off, suck it up, and never again be allowed to put depositor funds at risk on this commodities shell game ever again. And I have no trouble using some form of asset forfeiture against them to recover some of the stolen funds.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
that's what the greek people expected to happen. just printing more money.
NOW essentially what the goverment can do is to tax all money that is being held in greek accounts, almost the same as just printing new money.
they can't just print more money since they're in the euro, but the people still expect (and syriza promised to !) to pay money as usual. they expect that the government pays out more money than it has because that's "democratic".
also a confusing ballot is democratic according to syriza.. with an unlawlully short campaign time to boot. not that it matters, the cash is going to run out anyways. it's like the prime minister and finance minister either deliberately try to run the country into a crisis or they don't have even cursory knowledge of how things work.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Well gosh, I don't see how refusing to "live within your means" will get you living above your means even after your credit rating hits 0 and you can't borrow other people's money.
Moralizing gets you what? It gets you living withing your means, because nobody will loan you anything. ;) Oh, and a crashed economy too. And decades of poverty.
Borrowing everything you can to live outside your means doesn't get you the good life. It increases your poverty. It decreases the "means" that you have to live by.
People think when we say to "live within your means" we're engaging in some sort of moralizing. We're not. It is a physical statement. It is like saying, "eat within what you can get your hands on" or "eat what you can grow or buy or earn or otherwise acquire." Live within your lifespan. Walk within your speed capabilities. Don't bite off more than you can chew. Fly within the flight capabilities of your aircraft. You can't get a free lunch.
Blaming the Germans for your poverty won't put any food on your plate.
As a Greek, I am stunned, and disappointed, by the level of criticism (and hate!) in slashdot. What I clearly see is that fellow Europeans are being told huge LIES about the Greek crisis, and what this referendum means. I'll try to put things in perspective:
1. The money fellow European governments are giving us, are not free; They are loans, that we happily repay, even if the interest rate is a highway robbery compared to what they are paying.
2. Nobody said about "writing off the debt". What we ask is for the due date to go further in the future and the interest rate to be lower.
3. If the rest of the European governments cared at all to be repaid, then they wouldn't insist on "reforms" which have been 100% proven wrong, such as tax increases and pension/wage cuts. These are the stuff we object to. Many of the other important reforms (early pensions, unemployment benefits) are already imposed for quite some time now. I could write a book about how increasing taxes can't increase a country's GDP but guess what, there are even now so many books that prove this.
4. Especially to my Belgian friends: The 2 bailouts of Greece helped repay loans given by private sector banks. In effect, we traded private sector loans with state loans. In other words, you people lended us money so that your banks didn't lose their money. Now we owe you money (instead of your private banks) AND you think that this was a mistake. We do too, so we agree on this.
5. Greece doesn't need more money to "keep spending above its limit". We've had a more or less balanced budget for the last couple of years, apart from the loan interest payments. So we need you to lend us money so we can repay the loans you already gave us. Is this more reasonable than what we're asking? (To postpone the pay off date and decrease interest rate)
6. You are angry because we tricked our selves into the eurozone. You are right. We are angry too that you tricked us into the eurozone. There was nothing good for us there, no reason at all to be part of it, yet our politicians agreed with your politicians that we need to be part of it, no matter what. And they, all together, agreed to put Greece into the Eurozone, what a huge mistake that was and oh how many lies were told so we believed them (you did too). They made a ton of money out of it. Then they made a ton of money from the debt crisis itself. Meanwhile, half the Europe suffers from austerity (with Greece being the most hardly hit country, but Spain, Portugal, Ireland and Cyprus got a great feeling of what austerity means) and the other half is being taught that "lazy Greeks are asking to be given for more money).
Friends, stop hating each other, we're passed beyond this. The people is suffering, not only in Greece, but in other nations too. A Polish fried says "you should see my country", and some other said "we're poorer than you". And why is this? Who is benefiting? Does this mean that Poland et.al. have to double their taxes and cut their wages in half and pensions by 60%, destroy their healthcare and educational system, sell out everything that can be sold, just to become "richer"? Would anyone really suggest that? Then why is it a must-have for Greece? How on earth will this help repay the loans? Up until now, it has created a 27% unemployment and 99% misery.
So, please people, don't believe what your media say. You're not giving away money, we're not asking for free money. Greece has paid the price, and was punished hard, for decades of poor planning, bad habits and outrageous corruption. But it's time for other countries to stop hiding behind the propaganda and be realistic, just like we are now.
Because the debt is not sustainable. It will leave the Greek economy with huge interest payments that will cripple its economy for decades to come.
It is in Greece's interests to at least significantly restructure the repayments (much longer terms, with 0 interest on much of it for significant periods). Ultimately, they can do this unilaterally - "default" - in which case they might as well give themselves the best possible terms.
The vast majority of debt is owed to EU member states and institutions, and France and Germany in particular. It suited France and Germany for Greece to take on massive public debt in a bailout in 2010, because a good chunk of that money went to repaying *French* and *German* banks which risked becoming insolvent and collapsing otherwise - as Greece didn't have the money. The 2010 bail-out was as much, if not more, about saving *French and German* banks as about bailing out Greece. Indeed that bail-out broke IMF rules, but the IMF made an exception because of the exceptional systemic risk to global finance and the fears of another Lehman Brothers like collapse.
The sane solution for Greece in 2010 would have been to privately negotiate debt restructuring with its creditors, and unilaterally restructure payments where ever agreement couldn't have been reached. However, Greece was instead heavily pressurised by the rest of the EU to *not* do the sane thing, but instead take on *more* debt, because some of its creditors might have gone bust had Greece done the sane thing. Greece did this under pressure, and took this on to *save European banks*. Its own banking system got about €48 bn, to recapitalise, and its government got perhaps €20 bn to €30bn for operational needs (though even some amount of that went on financing costs).
Greece has been made to pay, very heavily, for the mistakes of the French and Northern European banking sector. Further, those who were *least* responsible for this crisis in Greece have been made to suffer the most - the poor, the young. This is fundamentally unfair.
Greece acted in solidarity with EU partners in taking on this bailout of, largely, *OTHER* European banks. The bailout was simply too big to be sustainable for the Greek economy, which has collapsed amid one of the largest recessions ever seen in the modern world. Instead of acting reasonably and recognising the solidarity the Greeks showed in 2010, several EU nations have - cowardly - instead tried to paint this as all the fault of lazy Greeks, which is an objective falsehood.
The EU *needs* a deal with Greece, because, as with all the previous deals, they are protecting *their own* banks, above all else. The Greeks now are saying any such deal also has to stop punishing them.
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
It's the person who believes the lie, or knows that's it's a lie and uses it for profit that creates the problem.
Greece lied to get into the Euro because it thought it was going to be richer with a stronger currency. The EU turned a blind eye to it because they wanted the Eurozone to be as large as possible. Both are now going to suffer because of it. The Eurozone countries are not going to get their money back and Greece is almost certain to exit the Euro and very possibly the EU since there is currently no legal means to drop the Euro while an EU member. At this point the best thing to do is make this happen as quickly and painlessly as possible.