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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."
Fuck those guys.
A developer working in Greece will pay taxes in Greece and spend most of his/her income in Greece.
A developer leaving Greece will not pay income tax in Greece and IF he/she sends back any money it is nothing compared to what he/she would earn in Greece. Furthermore Greece paid the developers education in the expectation it would be a wise investment in the future (education == long term investment).
Note, in case this developer is doing work for a foreign company, this adds to Greece export and the differences are even larger.
Sorry, the helping out relatives story is not in the interest of Greece.
I think it's pretty clear Varoufakis was turfed by Tsipras because the only hope in hell Greece now has of negotiating a deal with the Troika and remaining in the Eurozone and even in the EU is not having that man by his side. The price of even talking about a new deal and further bailouts is Varoufakis's head, which has been delivered to Merkel on a silver platter. This referendum was completely about Tsipras's political survival, and having achieved that, Greek voters will now witness just how utterly irrelevant the referendum was.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
"A developer working in Greece will pay taxes in Greece"
No he won't. That's why they're in this mess.
This is the first time that I can think of that a population directly voted in the affirmative to collapse their economy.
I hope that's just me being cynical, but I think that's what's on the way.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
The Greek financial disaster came from refusal to pay taxes and constant reduction in tax enforcement. This is the end result of modern "fiscal conservatism" and why a socialist government so easily swept into power there. The people bailing are people who suspect Greece is about to come knocking and demanding what was due a long time ago but they refused to pay.
Seriously! Have you made any attempt to understand this problem?
Former Greek governments borrowed the money, not bankers. Most of the money wasn't lent by bankers. The troika comprises the EU, the IMF and the European Central Bank - mostly politicians, not bankers.
The current problem facing Greece is that no-one will lend them any more money. Even if 100% of their past debts were written off, current tax receipts are insufficient to meet current expenditure. Without more money from the people you mistakenly call bankers, austerity in Greece will become much worse.
Put the blame where it really lies. Not with bankers, but with dishonest politicians and a delusional electorate who always believed someone else would pay their bills.
Yes Socialism...
The banks are not the cause of the problem here, but the symptom of the sickness that's killing Greece (and countries in similar situations). Greek banks WILL fail. They don't have stacks of euros to stuff into the ATM's and the people of Greece are desperately trying to empty their accounts because everybody knows that if you leave your cash in the bank, you won't get it out. Everybody wants to be in hard currency, euros. The banks have run out.
Ask yourself, how did Greece get to this point? Basically it's because they failed to make the most recent payment on their national debt. There isn't enough euros in the government coffers to make the payment, they defaulted and now they cannot borrow because nobody wants to lend them anything. Why is the government in Greece at this point? Because they SPENT money they didn't have and cannot raise. Normally countries just print more currency to pay loans, but you cannot do that when it's euros you need to print.
So what did Greece spend all this money on? Early retirement for everybody and social programs. Socialism in leaning, if not actual practice is what has Greece into crushing debt.
Greece is being crushed between the Eurozone and their debt, the debt that funded their social programs. The sad part though is that the people who will really pay for this are the poor, the people who didn't have the ability to move their assets OUT of Greece.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Not all of them returned, heck not even most of them returned. But risk-tolerance, ambition etc are not distributed uniformly, it follows the power law. So the 20% who returned took with them 80% of the risk-tolerance, ambition, entrepreneurship with them back to India.
So let Greece give up euro for drachma, let drachma fall as low as INR. It will thrive on tourism, and the Greeks coming back to start companies a few years down the road.
Germany has benefitted a lot by the economic union. Had Deutschmark stayed out of euro, its exports would have become so expensive no one could import them. 80% of Germany's exports are to rest of Europe. Capital would have naturally flowed to less expensive countries, and they would have the companies and employment restoring the balance. Greece leaving euro is going to be a bigger blow to Germany than to Greece.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The Greek financial disaster came from refusal to live within their means and not run chronic deficits for decades on end. This is the end result of modern "borrow and spend" liberalism taken so far as to ruin the finances of Greece and exhaust the patience of the rest of Europe. The people bailing are the "children" spoken of when conservatives are heard to say we must not saddle our children with debt.
The thing that is not said is that the reason we must not do this is not merely because it is morally reprehensible, which it is, but that the children simply won't pay it. Unless you are ready to erect gulags to enslave people you can't make them live their lives to fund your unlimited socialist dreams.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
The problem in the U.S. is not people who don't have skills. People have skills. The problem is that skills aren't valued. If you have skills, you will get paid shit. If you manipulate money, you will get paid a lot. This is why there's been such a geek brain drain into the financial industry. The U.S. does not value working for a living. We value gambling for a living.
Note not just socialism, but socialism *AND* cutting taxes low. They tried to have their cake and eat it too.
Of course before the Euro, they might have been able to stumble over this while massively devaluing their currency, and it wouldn't have been as disruptively bad. EU members might just have too much sovereignty to share a currency.
The Federal Reserve doesn't work like that. The USA can maintain its government deficit because enough people are willing to buy US government bonds. If, one day, people no longer trust it to repay its debts, there will be a financial meltdown the like of which the world has never yet seen.
The largest purchaser of US bonds today is ... wait for it ... the Federal Reserve.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
That's exactly the point: Greece has for a very, very long time been a two party system, both equally guilty of the current mess, hence the reference to the "Republicrats". This minster of finance and the current regime are not related to them at all. Could they have done a better job? Probably. Could the rest of the EU handled the situation better? I could hardly see how they could have done any worse. Their actions reek of racism, colonialism among other things, supported by a concerto of propaganda and outright lies. A shameful display indeed.
And btw, the problem isn't that they want to keep the Euro as such, it's among other things the horrendous state their institutions are in, and the fact that the main effect of the Euro is to prevent the Germans from pricing themselves out of the market with a ridiculously strong currency. The Euro creates tensions between strong economies and weak ones, and there is no way of easing them. And when the inequalities finally isn't manageable anymore, guess who suffers? Greece, or Germany.. Which I guess is the main reason why we see all this bullshit about early retirement, or the Greek people being inherently lazy and inferior: It's much easier and less dangerous to the big economies in the EU to sell those myths than admitting that the Euro is a failure and has built in faults which in its current state can not be mitigated.
Finally, the rock and the hard place isn't the Euro or not, it's being ordered to shut down their already poor economy in the name of "austerity", which by the way nobody believes is the cure for this disease anymore, that thesis is completely discredited. (That it's still on the table is a matter of prestige and saving face for a lot of big wigs who bought into it because it reminded them of their household budget. It was so neat. Simple, easy to explain to the voters, and best of all, someone else's fault.) So the "troika" on one hand forces the Greeks to gut their economy, such as it is, while at the same time ordering them to pay back loans which they already have to loan money to pay off. This is textbook colonial power behaviour, and how on earth anyone could possibly believe that would play out in any other way than it has, is beyond the pale.
You donâ(TM)t actually know what you are talking about do you.
Most of the loans in question here were in fact loaned by German and French bankers to the Greeks prior to the 2008, Deutsche bank was one of the biggest. They could get somewhat higher returns loaning to Greece and they had some security because Greece was in the Eurozone. That security unravelled with the 2008 crash.
The ECB, EU, IMF gave massive loans to Greece in 2010, and most of it immediately went to extricate the German and French banks from their bad greek loans. If the Greeks has defaulted on the original loans then there would have been a massive banking crisis in Germany and France. The 2010 EU bailout was to save their banks more than it was to help the Greeks.
The Greeks just got more debt piled on top of too much debt and its totally destroyed their economy. Recently released IMF studies confirm the Greeks canâ(TM)t sustain their current debt load and it has to be restructed or they have to default. If they stay the current course with austerity and more and more bailout loans they are doomed.
If the Greeks had been smart they would have exited the EU and defaulted on the debt in 2009 and the people who made the bad loans, the German and French bankers, would have paid the price. Instead they got off scot free.
Iceland immediately defaulted in a similar situation, they had some short term pain but they rebounded, while the Greece has gotten nothing but worse and worse under the yoke of a corrupt European and global banking system.
For banking and loans to work there is a simple rule, if you are foolish enough to make a bad loan to someone who probably wonâ(TM)t pay it back, then you pay the price when they default. Instead the people who make the bad loans (i.e. bankers) get to keep their bonuses profits and everyone else gets to pay for their stupidity, greed and corruption.
@de_machina
That's usually what happens when you fire everyone, liquidate what's left and then proceed to have no further source of income: A large inflow of cash, followed by nothing.
Yeah, look at how awful countries like Norway and Sweden are with all their "nanny-state policies".... they only have the highest standards of living in the world.
The bold tag doesn't make your nonsense correct buddy. What's going on has nothing to do with the gold bug horse shit you're spouting. Fiat currency is here to stay and if you're Edison-like ability to completely misunderstand the concept is irrelevant to the Tesla-like power the Fiat currency based systems have.
Crooked banks made bad loans to the crooked leaders than ran Greece, all because they thought the EU would bail out the country no matter what to protect the Euro. (And they'd make piles of money when it happened) Well, that didn't happen a whole lot of said crooked banks are facing a cascading collapse that will make the EU banking system more or less insolvent.
Said bankers are laying in HARD to the rest of the EU leaders to basically economically rape Greece's citizens with comfortable euphemisms called "Austerity", spinning racists stories about lazy entitled citizens. The Greek citzens, for once, are doing something sensible. They threw out the previous government and are saying "We've decided not to pay for the mistakes of banks and Con men. Go fuck yourselfs."
Get ready for a bank Collapse and a whole lotta nationalization. It worked for Iceland, after all.
When 51% are on the tit, democracy is over and done. Stick a fork in it.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
You do live in a democracy right? Why do you elect governments that perpetuate this nonsense?
When a majority of citizens are receiving benefits from the state, why would they vote to curtail those payments the government can't really afford? It's much easier to instead tax the *producers* of society.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
USA has its own version of what is Greece experiencing right now, that's what 'debt ceiling' is. Many believe that USA can simply print bonds and sell them and get out of jail free, however this only works as long as somebody buys those bonds and the bond market is the biggest bubble of all. USA will have its own currency crisis and bonds are currency promised into the future, so that will also collapse.
That is what the austerians want you to believe. The reality is that the USA will never have trouble 'selling' its bonds, because the federal reserve just buys them if nobody else will or it wants to drive down interest rates. This is precisely how the fed controls interest rates normally, and is the basis for quantitative easing. There is no possibility of the USA having a problem with its bonds because it can keep printing money until the economy takes off (at which point it would just create inflation).
The reason the austerians promote this message though, is that none of this comes for free. All this extra money will either cause an asset price bubble, which will wipe out all the savers money, or if that doesn't happen, massive inflation when the economy picks up. Either way savers are going to be paying for all that govt deficit spending in a macroeconomic rebalancing.
And that is what this conflict is about. Essentially the fed, ECB, BoE are saying to savers go and spend your money, stop hoarding it. But savers are not listening so aggregate demand is still broken. The debate now is whether the govt just goes and starts spending their money through QE funded deficits until they get the message, or just puts its hands up in exasperation and leaves things to stagnate for 20 years like in Japan. Obviously what you think is the right answer depends on whether you are a saver or borrower, though there is a clear best answer for the economy in general.
You're quite right that the first two bailouts primarily rescued Greece's creditors, but Greece already owed that money to someone. The losers in those transactions weren't the Greeks - the big losers European taxpayers who adopted the Greek government's debts.
But you're very mistaken if you think that the biggest buyers of government debt are the banks. Pension funds, investment funds and insurance companies have far more cash to splash.
You're also pretty ignorant if you claim that institutions perform no credit assessment of their investments. For traded bonds like government IOUs, that assessment is essentially outsourced to three credit reference agencies, Moody's, Standard and Poor's and Fitch. Those agencies are supposedly licenced and regulated but utterly failed to identify the risk with Greek debt ahead of the downturn. If you're looking for a scapegoat on the creditor side, they're a much better scapegoat than the banks.
Blaming the banks is a lazy knee-jerk reaction that's not really grounded in fact. P.S. I'm not a banker.
I could take a cash advance on a credit card at 28%, put it in a deposit account at 1%, and generate a surplus without taking interest payments into account.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."