That's pretty messed up. What about the elderly and the poor?
My grandmother (American) has never done one thing online in her life.
My grandmother (American) has never done one thing online in her life.
They’d have been better off if they had executed Grexit than be saddled paying off German banks.
Yeah, the scheme works like this:
- Greek state was bankrupt
- German banks and financial interests were over-exposed
- Germany used EU and EU funds to "aid Greece". The funds are not used in Greece in any way, but to repaid the debt, so its basically EU -> Greece -> German banks. Germany benefits tremendously, Greece is merely kept on life support (still bankrupt, still with the same -and bigger debt as before the "aid", just with a credit line that goes straight to debtors, e.g. mostly exposed German banks), and Greek state is forced to sell assets for 1/10th the price for select German and other players (with political and economic pressure as to which those would be).
- IMF piles on, pushing its own agenda (deregulation and other neoliberal/anti-welfare etc policies)
So it's basically a swindle on the EU populations, to make them pay for German banks using Greece as an intermediary + a way to not let Greece default, but have it suffer a fate worse than default (mostly, selling everything to the lowest bidder and still being in the same piled-on debt).
Well, that would be German elites. German people still paid like other Europeans for this scheme -- though the transaction also benefitted Germany economically, so somethings trickled.
As far as I know that means that creditors from northern Europe paid 50% of debts. This is organized default and a deal package that came with it. I wouldn't say German banks were exactly winners here.
That's a huge bargain for the banks compared to bankruptcy and its impact.
And the Greek government (much less the people) still doesn't see that 50% write-off, since instead of defaulting and making a clean start with it, it's forced to take new lifeline loans, sell off assets at special ultra-low prices, and still repay everything. The current debt after a decade of "aid" is larger than the initial value - meanwhile their GPD has took an impact similar to that of war.
For a private company or citizen, it would be the equivalent of not having the option to go bankrupt, but instead be sold to slavery.
"https://www.amazon.com/Crashed-Decade-Financial-Crises-Chang...
i't was the same story in most of the east europe. west banks where overexposed in the east europe, they pumped the "rising" markets in the east, and once the money stooped coming everything stopped. and now the west banks lobbied to give those local branches more modey so that they where not so exposed any more.
1. German banks were exposed, yes, but they were not much more exposed than banks in other EU countries. Look at the table in [0]; total absolute exposure of German banks is second after French banks. If you normalize this to the size of the respective economies, many other countries' banks were more exposed, including Belgium, The Netherlands, Cyprus.
2. The whole thing was an action of the EU and IMF, not of Germany specifically, and the table in [0] should sufficiently explain why, even if you take the most cynical possible view.
3. The whole concept of a "German bank" is a bit ridiculous in a globalized economy.
4. The idea that Germany can just go ahead and "use EU funds" is nonsensical. That's the EU's money, and Germany is a part of the EU.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2011/jun/17/greece...
If I remember correctly, Varoufaki's stratagem was to claim that we would be better off outside the EZ and back to our own currency (the drachma) which we could devalue unlike the Euro.
However, the drachma was valued to €340.750, when we joined the EZ [1]. That would have meant that our debt of ~€355.49 billion [2] we would have to pay 12,113,321,750,000 drachmas.
Note that we would supposedly try to pay off this debt by devaluing the drachma, which means, by printing more of it. That in turns mean that we would have to carry out our internal transactions with a devalued drachma. I don't know how to calculate the devaluation that would be needed, but I think the predictions that we would be back to the WWII situation where a loaf of bread cost a trillion drachmas, that many made at the time, were not too wide off the mark.
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[1] https://www.euro-hellas.gr/isotimia-euro-drahmis.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_government-debt_crisis
Converted to Euros based on current exchange rate of 1 Dollar to 0.9 Euro.
It’s too bad he kinda chickened out and didn’t call the ECBs bluff. I say kinda because I don’t think he ever intended to execute Grexit as he had threatened, but was rather using it as “leverage” but they saw right through that. Syriza should have made him do it.
I don't see how anything good could come from turning our country into a financial pariah.
If it's on income, wouldn't this group always be approaching 100%?