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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.
Eu has been very cruel to Greece and the Greek people.
Imf and troika already admitted through internal and leaked reports that Greek debt needs to be restructured. Yet they purposely are throwing Greece under the bus in an act of financial war. (to make them fall in line through force)
Hopefully this is the first step in dismantling the unelected eurocrats in ecb and troika who are destroying the European continent.
Greece will stay in Europe and the euro but start the process of fixing the euro so that it works for the piigs too.
Whatever your opinion of her otherwise, The Iron Lady saw this coming
007: "Who are you?"
Pussy: "My name is Pussy Galore."
007: "I must be dreaming..."
The City of Detroit's property taxes are ridiculously high -- as property values collapsed, they kept bumping it up to keep up the city income, helping to drive out further business.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Europe appears to be prepared to maintain the current minimal level of bank support going until the 20th (yep, these bank runs are happening even with the banks still receiving some support, just not as much as they were before). On the 20th Greece will miss a payment that will give then the grounds to withdraw the remainder of the support propping up the banks - any banks still around then will probably collapse immediately (assumedly being nationalized). If Greece doesn't resort to printing currency (whether they call it an "IOU" or not) before then, they will have to at that point.
Greece has a press in Athens to print 20 euro notes and has recently started talking about using it to make up their Euro shortfall. They're seriously playing with fire here, as that would be counterfeiting if they're not authorized to do so. There's talk about launching lawsuits to try to get the courts to grant them the right to print more euros. But how far they're willing to play that risky game if they don't get any sort of authorization... well, only time will tell. If Greece prints counterfeit euros, there's really no limit to how extreme this thing could escalate - Europe would be forced to wall off trade with Greece and even potentially travel restrictions to avoid them getting into circulation. The calm, measured response on Greece's part would just be to introduce a parallel drachma currency rather than printing euros, but Syriza isn't exactly famous for calm, measured responses. And nobody has a drachma press - it takes longer to set up a press for mass production of a new currency than one might think. Really, where this all could lead is hard to speculate....
The human body can be drained of blood in 8.6 seconds given adequate vacuuming systems.
The European plan wasn't actually implemented. Basic things like, hey guyz, why don't you put together a land registry so people know who owns what? Yeah, that didn't happen. Ever. Been talked about since the 90s. Every other modern economy has one, Greece doesn't.
What about relaxing the labour rules? In most parts of the world it's possible to fire people for incompetence. In Greece, it's so hard to fire a civil servant that there is a case of a man who literally murdered the town mayor with an Uzi, went to prison ....... and wasn't fired, in fact, he continued to draw a salary whilst locked up! This is so absurd it's unreal yet, this is Greece.
There are tons of reforms that would actually be good for Greece in the long run, but Syriza seems to think every single reform is a bargaining chip.
Very badly, without a doubt. A humanitarian crisis is now looking not just thinkable but downright likely. The EU will pay vastly greater sums before the Greek crisis is over, if only because a failed state within the Schengen zone would make the current EU migrant problems look like a Sunday picnic in comparison.
Waves of starving Greek refugees who cannot afford food fleeing a country beset by blackouts and riots is something that Europe cannot afford, and thus, there is really no option but to continue massive wealth transfers into Greece. The only question is how the EU will ensure the Greek government is replaced with a proxy government, without triggering even greater problems.
One thing is for sure. All the people who voted OXI in the referendum thinking they would be taking control of their own destiny are deluded. Greece is about to fall apart. They will end up grabbing any lifelines the EU gives them regardless of how they voted.
Solidarity. Yes. I love and up your comment. I live in Poland which by Greek standards is kind of poor. I see poor people everyday, I also face hard working people daily. The ones which build up the economy on which Greece can now bargain for details - please also think about us who lend you the money. We are a community.
The fundamental problem here is that Greek pay (in Euros) is disproportionately high compared to their productivity vs other Eurozone nations'. "Austerity" is simply reducing wages to bring that wages-to-productivity ratio back in line with the EU norm. The reforms the EU was asking for addressed the other half of this ratio - increasing average Greek productivity. The growing Greek debt is created by this imbalance - people were being paid more Euros than they were producing via their labor. Greece was covering up this imbalance by borrowing, which is totally the wrong reason to borrow money. You borrow it to purchase things which will help increase your productivity so that you will no longer be running a deficit. You don't borrow it to continue to operate in arrears.
By rejecting austerity and failing to implement reforms, you don't leave many choices. The simplest is to boot Greece off the Euro. Then they can do whatever the hell they want with their economy, pensions, and pay, and it will automatically balance itself out via the Drachma falling in value vs. the Euro. You can either take a 30% pay cut in Euros, or you can switch to the Drachma and the Drachma declines in value 30% vs. the Euro. The end result is the same - "austerity". (Ideally Greece would increase their average productivity by 30% - then wages wouldn't have to drop. But they seem hell bent on refusing to do anything the EU suggests that could improve productivity.)
This is an incredibly stupid idea borne of holier-than-thou moralizing about currency valuations. You know why Germany wanted everyone in on the Euro? Because sans Euro, German exports drive the Deutschmark through the roof, German exports promptly tank, and everyone else has a fair shot of attracting investment, business and industry to setup those export economies in "weaker" nations.
The Euro doesn't work because it's an economic union without political union to match it. The currency represents a bizarre aggregate of political goals, rather then allowing the efficacy of policy in individual regions to drive it. What's really going to bend people's minds is when Greece exits the Euro and then runs a mini-economic boom on the back of cheap Drachma making investment suddenly very attractive again.
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.
You're blaming Greece for this? Why the hell did your country bail out Greece's creditors and take on Greece's debts? If your country had acted responsibly they would have let Greece's creditors fail.
The situation now is that we have Creditor A lending money to debtor B which Creditor A knows in advance that debtor B cannot pay back. So Creditor A then sells the debt that they already know cannot be paid back to EU countries. The only question in all this is: why did your country agree to this?
The people you should be mad at are the ones who bailed out the creditors. Once the loans were made to Greece, the "austerity measures" imposed +- five years ago were simply a blind to get the private creditors paid. Greece owed money to private creditors; your country (part of EU) decided to loan Your Money to Greece on condition that Greece paid back the private creditors. I feel no sympathy for any of the current creditors.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
The pensions and benefits thing is just a red herring that certain media loves to repeat. The reality is that Greeks who can't find a job, which is about a quarter of them, are extremely poor and the benefits amount to very little. Even those in work are low wages, part time hours and little hope that things will improve if they continue down the road they are on.
Their position is reasonable. Some of them voted for the irresponsible policies, but many of them, particularly the young, did not. Okay, the problem must be dealt with, but austerity is not the only way. Look at what Obama did in the US, he stimulated the economy with massive spending and is paying it off now things have recovered. Greece wants to fix its economy and get back on the road to recovery before settling its debts, so that ordinary people don't suffer unbearably.
If you want to vote "no" on your credit card bill go ahead, just declare yourself bankrupt. At some point that is a better option than trying to continue servicing your debt. No-one wants that, least of all the creditors, so why push you to that point if they can agree better terms and eventually get their money back?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC