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Comment by Al-Khwarizmi | Hacker News Reader

I hope you are being ironic. The EU and the IMF pretty much screwed up Greece, this has even been admitted by the IMF themselves.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnmauldin/2016/08/23/jthe-imf...

So I'm honestly not surprised that they turn to China, maybe the EU should treat their own countries decently (and I say this as a non-Greek EU citizen).

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Greece screwed up Greece before they even joined the eurozone. They weren't even eligible for that but still managed to do so by cooking the books (with the help of the likes of Goldman Sachs etc).

Which was well known to the EU, happy to have them on board regardless. Expansion at any cost.

The same reason much of the corruption is tolerated in Eastern Europe. Expansion at all costs -- must have a buffer between Russia.

Na, I don't think Russia played into this all that much. Excessive ambition, overzealous idealism, and internal politics were much more relevant. Don't forget that when these decisions were made Russia wasn't perceived to be the threat it's seen as today, at least not by the EU of that day. E.g. poland joined in 2004, but much of the talks were in the 90s- and thus in an era when Russia was far from threatening. Putin didn't become president until 2000. So while the EU certainly wasn't looking for a buffer, it's much more plausible that the new members were less sanguine about future Russia (and how right they were), thus seeking to cement their independence from the USSR.

It's somewhat ironic, for instance, to consider that it was the UK that particularly pushed for expansion. Not only did they lobby hard internally beforehand, they were (IIRC?) only EU country to immediately grant free immigration from the new members, without any transition period - how times change!

Ireland also did this. Mind you, they probably just copied whatever the UK was doing, as was the style of the times (spare a thought for the poor Irish public servants, who will be forced to transpose their own European directives into law from next year, rather than just copying the UK).

And they were hoping it would be fixed, which obviously didn't happen. So to be fair You can't solely blame EU for that.

I suppose it depends of your definition of screwed up.

The emigration, life expectancy, and growth data don't say that. Not even the public debt data say that.

A whole generation's life chances ruined across several countries?

It seems I'm being down-voted.

I will clarify in case the reason is that I didn't explain myself properly: the data don't say that Greece screwed up so much before the current crisis.

It has been always a country with problems but the statistics were improving until they get "rescued".

If you’re looking for someone who came out of the Greece/EU saga looking good, you probably won’t find it.

The Greeks themselves somehow made a society with a shocking amount of tax dodging.

The Greek government allowed this, and lied its ass off while applying to the EU.

The EU either didn’t do due diligence or didn’t care. Once the time bomb did it’s inevitable thing, they were “shocked” and proceeded to punish Greece with forced austerity measures.

EU citizens from their part expressed some pretty ugly sentiments against the Greeks, IIRC.

Pretty much everyone came out of this looking far worse.

> The Greek government allowed this

To understand the tax mentality of Greeks, it's worth pointing that not a single Greek government existed in modern history that didn't have multiple corruption scandals and blatant misspending/mismanagement incidents come to light. And only a small percentage of those incidents probably ever came into light. The last two generations got used to knowing that tax money vanish into a black hole, needless public sector hires, ridiculous under-the-table contracts, etc, all while the public health system was suffering to the extent that bribing the doctors to receive decent service became the norm. That practice extended everywhere: you'd bribe for your driving license or you'd likely fail even if you did everything right, you'd bribe the tax inspectors or you'd face fines even if everything was in order, etc. Not saying that this makes tax evasion a good thing but it does feed some interesting thoughts about how hard it is to change a system that keeps mishandling tax money while failing the people and how the natural urge of the people in these cases is to just avoid contributing into it however they can.

Indeed. As I said, nobody came out looking clean.

I think the kindest thing you could say is that the Greek populace basically gave up on good governance and decided to make do with what they had, which is kind of damning with faint praise.

Greece pretty much screwed up Greece.

Source: I'm Irish, we screwed up Ireland.

Ireland was surely screwed up by loose Eurozone monetary policy in the middle of its massive housing bubble.

Yep

Ireland could hardly pursue appropriate monetary policy as a member of the currency union. Euro monetary policy is totally driven by Germany's needs. So are we saying that the real screw-up was joining the currency union?

There are ways to mitigate that - e.g. increased taxes based on land value and stronger legislation around lending. Trouble is, rising house prices are more popular to politically powerful groups.

Yeah, can’t really see that being politically viable.

Hot money flowing into a country does crazy things to it. It takes both an irresponsible borrower and an irresponsible lender to make an irresponsible deal.

Yes all this "news" we're hearing this morning on this topic is just Germany realizing that Greece have decided they prefer an abusive relationship with China to their previous abusive relationship with Germany. Germany protests!

Yeah, good luck when the Chinese will confiscate your assets.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/12/world/asia/sri-lanka-chin...

Make a list of islands you want to give away for 99 years.

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