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Software Devs Leaving Greece For Good, Finance Minister Resigns
New submitter TheHawke writes with this story from ZDNet about the exodus of software developers from Greece. "In the last three years, almost 80 percent of my friends, mostly developers, left Greece," software developer Panagiotis Kefalidis told ZDNet. "When I left for North America, my mother was not happy, but... it is what it is." It's not just the software developers quitting either. The Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis also resigned. A portion of his resignation announcement reads: "Soon after the announcement of the referendum results, I was made aware of a certain preference by some Eurogroup participants, and assorted ‘partners’, for my ‘absence’ from its meetings; an idea that the Prime Minister judged to be potentially helpful to him in reaching an agreement. For this reason I am leaving the Ministry of Finance today."
Sorry, but you are incorrect. Greece reported a nearly 2 billion euro surplus in 2014, without taking interest payments into account. http://www.wsj.com/articles/greece-misses-target-on-budget-surplus-1421244654
If their debt were wiped out today they would keep that money and need no further bailouts. Better yet they could go back to the Drachma and manage their currency with a combination of monetary and fiscal policy, just like every other sovereign nation in the developed world.
You can't oversimplify the Greek situation as "socialism". There are plenty of examples of countries that are doing fine economically with policies that embrace social spending. The Greek situation is far more complex and involves politics and the Euro as much as anything else.
Sorry, but you're out of date. The Greek government's primary surplus disappeared shortly after the election of the Syriza government.
Women wanting to be housewives aren't the problem. The problem is a socieconomic setup that makes it difficult to support a family on one income unless you're relatively well qualified or otherwise independently wealthy. Very few of the acceptable latter day social philosophies have a reproductive strategy outside of mass private or public childcare facilities, which most responsible parents quite rightly find repugnant.
If you do it by creating money out of thin air - yes, it shouldn't count as much. And that's what Germany and France were essentially doing all along.
And yes, I do have actual data to prove it: http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/s...
If you check the numbers in details, it turns out that almost half of the German economic growth during the 2002-2008 period is solely because of this debt export to the periphery.
Most of the money wasn't lent by bankers.
Yes, it actually was. The EU/IMF/ECB then bailed those banks out, for some inexplicable reason, by taking the debt off their hands. Neither group, bankers or EU, did risk analysis. If they did, Greece never would have been lent the money in the first place.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
From your comments, it's obvious that you don't understand what money is.
Money is an IOU.
That's it. There's nothing magic about it. The IOU issuer's ability to repay the IOU is the only thing in question. In this regard, the US and its dollars (IOU's printed in green and black, and again, not magic) are not going anywhere.
A government, at its inception, has nothing but promises of infrastructure and protection. It buys its supplies with IOU's. Then it provides community infrastructure and military protection. This proves its worth and provides the "backing" for those IOU's. At the end of a set period of time (a "tax year", if you will), the IOU-holders are expected to forgive some of that debt. The government takes back some of its outstanding IOU's from each debtor. The cycle is complete and begins anew. Non-payers can expect to face a militarized force's demands for payment.
If you layer on centuries of bureaucratic shortcuts and institutionalization of the mechanisms therein, you'll get what we have today. But it all started out with a very basic, very simple premise: a break-even business loan.
Now, think about what the USA (or Greece) provides to its citizens. It provides governmental services. It deserves payment for those services in the form of forgiveness of its debt. If this year's payments don't cover the costs of next year's services, well, that's expansion and they should take out a bigger loan (print more IOU's). But if this year's payments don't cover the costs of this year's services, then they need to raise prices, use their military to make sure payment is collected, or both.
The backing of a currency is not a physical resource, it's a measure of trust in the provider of said currency.
This holds equally true for Bitcoin, which is why Bitcoin is going to be a quaint footnote in computing history in a few years. Nothing backs it. Math is discoverable and essentially worthless as a backing. It's like collecting tree leaves and calling them money. You can grab them from just about anywhere, and there's technically a finite number of them. But nobody's going to give you anything in trade for them. (Except maybe a damned good kicking, which you'll deserve.)
Norway has massive natural resource exports accounting for nearly 33% of GPD, imports half of what it exports and only 3 million people in the labor force. Sweden's GPD is also nearly 33% exports, slight trade imbalance in favor of exports and 5 million people in the labor force.
Greece has 12% GPD from exports, imports twice as much as it exports and has only 5 million in the workforce.
For perspective, the USA makes only 9% of GPD from exports (that includes the recent massive increase in gas and oil exports), imports 50% more than it exports and has 156 million people in the workforce.
Norway and Sweden's success has nothing to do with political models and entirely to do with geography. If the Aegean had oil fields, Greece would be a socialist paradise too.
A few additional interesting facts:
1) The original cause of the Greek debt was due to the fact that greek labor costs were significantly higher than other EU nations. When they joined the EU, this caused a large trade deficit...leading to lower GDP and higher debt.
2) Greece has always been somewhat left-leaning and rather than curtail spending during low income years, they actually increased spending by incurring more debt
3) The government (with the help of some banks) "hid" their massive deficit spending through the use of credit default swaps. This made Greece appear to be a better investment than they actually were when other banks provided loans.
4) Greece also historically has one of the highest rates of tax evasion
All of the above contributed to the present crisis, not just "bad greek loans".
Citations mostly from wikipedia, but plenty of similar info on the web.