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Comment by seivan | Hacker News Reader

Expect this to happen all over Europe. In particular England. It has happened before and will happen again, until the fuckers in charge understand and learn.

But no one would vote on the guy calling for budget cuts. Everyone likes the guy with the hand outs.

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"England" isn't in the euro, it has a central bank that can and will print money if required. If anything chances are the UK will be on the receiving end of any money transferred out of Greece, Portugal, Spain e.t.c. because it's within the EU (and therefore other EU citizens can easily open bank accounts) but not inside the eurozone (the UK has not funded any of the EU bailouts except via contributions to the IMF)

i.e. "has one's cake and eats it"

Greece has cut its budget on an order of ~20%. It hasn't helped them at all.

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/data/GRCGFCEQDSMEI_Max_...

Jeez, this was -forced- from europe, the Greeks didn't vote it in. My point is, no politician that's paycheck depends on votes will ever force this in. It has to come from the outside - EU.

According to the article government spending wasn't the problem here, the problem was Cypriot banks making bad investment decisions.

My understanding is that banks in Cyprus are heavily invested in Greek bonds (makes sense given the shared language/culture/etc) and that the Greek bailout resulted in the bondholders taking a 50% "haircut" which set off the current banking crisis in Cyprus. And now the "solution" to the problem in Cyprus is likely to set off bank runs in other troubled Eurozone economies. One domino knocks over the next ...

Edit: half of this is in the article which I didn't read before commenting ;-)

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