Comment by NotableAlamode | Hacker News Reader

Comment by NotableAlamode | Hacker News Reader

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I'm not sure I see your point. Greece has a perfectly democratic way of getting rid of its debt: default. Russia in 1998 was the last big European country to do so. Iceland's banks also defaulted on some wholesale depositors a few years ago. Greece has (partly or fully) defaulted on foreign debt already on several occasions in the past. Greece has in effect already defaulted on some of its current debt, although it is not always called a default. Moreover Greece is getting extremely favourable interest rates and repayment schedules on its remaining debt.

The real question is: why is Greece not going the democratic way of defaulting on its external debt? And the answer is, as you know well, that Greece wants to continue receiving all that sweet EU money. Why stop a good thing?

    ... impose non-sensical demands ...

Have you considered that not everybody thinks that fighting corruption, tax-avoidance etc is non-sensical?

Agreed. However, once again, we should not compare directly solutions of Iceland (banks) and Greece (government), because the problems are quite different.

Iceland (the country, the government) was not in much debt and did not default. Icelandic banks did default and went bankrupt. The banks (Kaupthing, Glitnir and Landsbank) were split so that Icelandic debts and assets were moved into new surviving publicly owned domestic versions of the banks, and the foreign remnants of the banks were placed into receivership and liquidation.

Russia, the country, actually defaulted. Russia is today not known as a safe place for investments (though the history of a default is just a small part there; in Russia's assets, it has huge energy reserves, and in its liabilities, it has kleptocracy, corruption and an arbitrary justice system).

Sure, but it's a tried and tested way of getting rid of one's debt. Many (most?) countries have used it in the past, see [1], including the USA.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_default#List_of_sove...

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