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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.
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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.
Germany started the war; Germany got some $1.5 billion in 1950 dollars. It ended up repaying less than $1 billion. Greece got $376 million, so Germany was given more money for free than Greece got total.
Let's continue whoever57's analogy.
Your family have lived in a house for generations. A few years ago the house needed a bunch of work adding rooms and generally upgrading it to fit your new status as members of the respectable middle class. You didn't have the cash but you had the status and rates were cheap, so you took out a bank loan to cover it. As that loan came due, your husband lost his high paying job and had to take a cut.
So you begged with the banks and eventually they agreed to lend you more money, but at a higher interest rate. Paying more interest on less money is tough, the house continues to need work to keep it in good repair and you continued to not quite make ends meet. You go to the banks and beg for more money so you can keep paying the interest and repairs but the banks say no, they say you need to live within your means.
You promise to do that, and you quickly 'adjust' your finances to show how it's all going to work out. The bank sees through the farce immediately but he's a greedy fellow and with you agreeing to add 200 more basis points onto the rate, it's gotta be good for him. If you default, your cousin will probably cover it anyway so it isn't much risk.
You keep struggling, and you have to beg the banks for money every month. This starts to annoy and worry the banker, so he starts taking an increasing interest in your life. Don't do a good repair here, just leave the window broken... Don't send your kids off to uni, educate them at the local community college. These things save a little cash, but they also lead to you having to spend a whole lot more time looking after the house instead of making money. Even worse, your kids having a lower level of education means they can't get such a high paying job to help out which is a real problem since your grandparents have now retired and are moving back in.
You get desperate and crawl to the bank begging for more and more. They look over the situation and say, well, maybe, but you have to cancel all expenditure. House repairs, who needs them? Further education, completely abolished!
You hold a family conference. What to do? Give in to what the bank wants and destroy your family's future? Or default and have the bank potentially take possession of your family home. Put like that, it isn't such a hard call, you tell the bank to f. off and wait too see what will happen.
Who's at fault? You for living beyond your means? Yep. You for lying to the bank? Yep. The bank for accepting such an obvious lie? Yep. The bank for loaning money to someone that couldn't possibly pay it back? Yep. The bank for insisting on austerity measures that will have a negative long term fiscal impact, yep.
Does that help?
Blah, blah ... the Greeks are victims ... blah, blah.... the poor Greeks... blah, blah ... those evil Germans... blah blah. I listened to the prime minister of Poland a few days ago giving his thoughts about the situation in Greece. He said Poland went through a long series of painful reforms after the fall of communism and is now experiencing a measure of economic recovery and how there is zero sympathy for the Greeks pissng and moaning about having to reform entitlement systems that the Poles can't even dream about implementing today. I don't know how generally the Polish people agree with him but I sure did. I'm getting really sick and bloody tired of the Greeks. Many nations around Europe have implemented painful reforms and here are the bloody Greeks going: We want to keep the our time tested system of bribery, political patronage, corruption, systematic benefits fraud, we'd like you to bankroll our totally marode and unfunded pension system while our politicians fish for votes by promising pensioners a 13th month of payouts (this is a totally unfunded promise by the Greek govt. and also keep in mind that pensioners in countries funding the aid packages to Greece don't get a 13th month) on top of