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Comment by zurn | Hacker News Reader

The mechanism by which Germany has benefited at the expense of other Euro countries is the large trade surplus vs exchange rates.

Normally a big country's currency will appreciate once they start running prolonged large trade surpluses, but the Euro has enabled Germany to keep siphoning in wealth in a way that wasn't possible before the Euro. Similarly pre-Euro the southern countries would have seen their currencies depreciate and get a break in competitiveness.

Hartz is also part of it, Germany has kept labour costs down while southern countries in the same currency area experienced high inflation due to masses of cheap money coming in again due to the Euro.

And of course Germany has been leading the austerity brigade in response to the crisis.

http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/ben-bernanke/posts/2015/04/03...

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I am not sure if Germany at fault here, bringing in the euro was not forced by them and Greece was cooking the books to get in.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2011/09/12/greece-wa...

I think most of southern Europe should be not in the euro zone at all, their economy would have better time on a weaker currency.

http://stephansmithfx.com/articles/how-a-weak-currency-affec...

> I am not sure if Germany at fault here, bringing in the euro was not forced by them and Greece was cooking the books to get in.

s/Greece/people running Greece at that time/ If you asked the who didn't profit from joining the Euro, likely you might have gotten a negative reply.

Seriously it's not a fault issue here because multiple parties (including the vampire squids that are multination financial corporations like Goldman) conspired to profit from it.

Question is what is going to be done to right the ship and avoid calamity?

Given the situation, I don't think that Greece has anything to gain from staying in the common currency.

After ~ 8 years of Troika mismanagement the country is in dire situation and there has not been the slightest perception of improvement. So even if SYRIZA choose to blink, the next government wont.

Singling out Greece's creative accounting in Euro accession as the main problem is blaming the victim here. A lot of the countries did it to some extent, the EU turned a blind eye. And most of Greece's budget deficit happened only after joining the Euro. Greece is despite their own share of f-ups largely a casualty of the systemic problems and EU's failure in handling of the crisis.

Come on, they cooked their own books and noone forced them. They may suffer from that now but pointing that out is not 'victim blaming'.

Spain is also suffering and they didn't cook their books. It was also an open secret that Greece's numbers were manipulated, but the ideal of a united Europe with one currency overruled economic pragmatism.

Even if Greece had no corruption at all they would still be in a nearly indistinguishable position. They still would have been flooded with debt (simply a consequence of interest rates dropping during the boom) and they would still get a crushing depression (because that's what happens when you share a currency with larger and economically stronger countries).

When Greece joined the Euro the outcome was nearly inevitable, so blaming Greece for this makes little sense. The austerity policies the troika imposed on the Greek people were brutal and completely unnecessary, though. So that's the outrageous part.

The austerity measures weren't just unnecessary, they actively hurt the Greek economy, making it even harder for them to repay the remaining debt. It was totally stupid.

I see. What is you suggested solution?

I don't think there's a solution that's politically palatable to all parties.

To fix the humanitarian crisis in Greece they need money in the short term, and the opportunity to do substantial reform in the long term. This ultimately benefits everybody in Europe, but it's not an easy sell. The press coverage of the crisis has been so toxic that most people in Germany, Belgium, France, etc, believe that any money going to Greece will by definition get squandered. On top of that there are prejudicial stereotypes about Greeks being lazy (false: in a country with poor infrastructure you have to work more hours to get even a little work done) or that they've benefited immensely from the Euro (false: Germany is the big beneficiary because they're the biggest exporter. The "opportunity" Greece got to borrow cheaply was a trap, and Greece's economy is wrecked now).

So even the politicians who understand the economics don't dare suggest major debt forgiveness and fiscal transfers. This isn't even an outrageous solution, if you remember that states like Mississippi and Alabama net more than 500bln from the federal government, every year. This subsidy is much larger than the entire GDP of Greece. The US is willing to subsidize poorer member states, and the EU should do the same. Otherwise the Euro will fall apart, and the humanitarian catastrophe will worsen.

You seem to pretend that Greece is a single atomic unit. The people cooking those books were neither the voters nor the current government, both of whom are victims of the mismanagement of previous governments.

Of course the voters should never have elected them in the first place, but look at the loons that American voters keep voting for. And the Greek crooks were given both the means and the motive to cook the books, because there was status attached to joining the euro, and the rules were not being enforced so strictly back then. And the easy loans after joining the euro let them pretend to their voters that all was fine.

I guess than the greek people should go find those people who were cooking the books and hold them accountable.

I yet to see how the bad greek government is anybody else's problem other than the voters who put them in place and the country itself. Politicians like to take credit for every progress but never take the blame.

Imagine if you did the same thing as a leader of a corporation. Why is it different than bad leaders of a country? Just because politicians are historically untouchable?

What is the guarantee that it wont happen again with the current government? Did anything change?

They found them already. They were Goldman Sacks. No kidding.

Seriously? That would actually not be very surprising at all.

Another good article about the German situation is this post from Simon Wren-Lewis: http://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-real-problem-wit...

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