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>We managed to move from a 14% deficit to a 1% surplus in just four years. Four. Fucking. Years. No other country in the developed world has done such a feat in such a short time. The effect of that was tremendous for the population, 50% of young people are unemployed.

yep, man, those sacrifices would mean that some bondholders in Germany will get their half-percent... I'm really feeling for your people - i myself lived through pretty devastating (or as it happened - transforming) years 25 years ago in USSR/Russia and such things are brutal to regular people.

Anyway, just compare - having your own currency, you could have covered the 14% deficit just by printing those money - it would have caused a few percent of inflation, like 5-6%. Few years ago US had like 3 times bigger deficit than that Greece's deficit (and FY2014 US deficit is about the same as Greece's) and just kept printing the money with official inflation less than 2% or something like this. And unemployment situation is among all times best today.

> just compare - having your own currency, you could have covered the 14% deficit just by printing those money

Perhaps most glaring is the ECB's current Quantitative Easing effort to the tune of 1 trillion euros, buying assets and bonds in every country but greece [1]. This devaluing of currency is paid for by all users of the Euro, including greek. And yet it is used to prop up the same banks and countries greek lends from on conditions of austerity?

1. http://www.ecb.europa.eu/mopo/implement/omt/html/index.en.ht...

I actually sympathize with the Tsipras guy. He took on an impossible job and in my opinion he is actually making the best of it. You see, Greece has to default. We all know that. All that is needed now, is a sufficient number of face-saving gestures that will allow everybody to come out of this heads up high. Angela Merkel is grumbling and fumbling in the back, but she can be talked in to accepting a new deal, on the condition that the deal is both complicated and ambiguous enough, that she can sell it as a great victory back home. Problem solved.

> he is actually making the best of it

Please tell me you were making a joke.

Trying to collect WW2 "debt" from Germany? Using "insulted dignity" as an argument in financial negotiations? Deliberately setting up the referendum after the deadline and then "pleading" for extension? Really? He is pulling all the stops, granted, but they are nothing short of sleazy and obnoxious. If EU are to cave in, it would basically mean that EU is susceptible to blatant manipulation. So they won't.

The only way out of this mess is for the referendum to resolve with Yes, for Tsipras to step down and his replacement to agree to whatever the last EU proposal was. Tsipras tried the unorthodox approach and it didn't work, not much left he can do now but to leave.

There are two kinds of debt claims relating to WWII. One is war reparations. We didn’t received any from Germany and chances are we never will. I assume you have no idea to the extent of damages done by Germans in Greece during the war. They destroyed 80% of our infrastructure. Besides Poland, Greece suffered the most damages during the war. But given that all that happened 70 years ago we should bury the hatchets and stop making claims.

The second debt relates to an official loan that Hitler took in gold from our central bank. It is documented and is considered a state loan. We have every fucking right to claim it. It is somewhere between 8 and 12 billion Euros by today standards.

By the way, back in 1954 the Greek government agreed to write off a big part of the German debt owed to us [1]. Those are state loans completely independent to war reparations. So while we did it for them they deny it to us. And we did it while our economy was in a far worse state than German economy is today.

The problem we have with Germans is that they’re ungrateful pricks.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Agreement_on_German_Ext...

> war reparations. We didn’t received any from Germany and chances are we never will

Incorrect. West Germany paid 115 million Deutschmarks to Greek victims of Nazi crimes in 1960 (a lot more than the $45 million reparations that were demanded by the 1947 Paris Peace Treaty), while victims of the forced labour camps were also compensated individually.

Shame on you for spreading bald faced lies.

The unconvenient truth that none of you fuckers wants to admit:

http://www.truth-out.org/speakout/item/24456-the-math-of-mas...

Concerning Greece paying up, you have no choice: they can't. Read my lips: They have no money. The EU proposal was simply not realistic. Any proposal that contains the idea that Greece would be paying up, is a dead-end, non-starter.

Concerning Greece remaining in the EU and the Euro, you do have a choice. It would be short-sighted to expel Greece. You see, everybody just has to learn their lesson. In the future, don't let your commercial banks buy too much Greek debt paper, because you will end up paying instead. It takes two to tango. There's no point in blaming just one side of the equation. The other side is responsible too.

They have no money

Greece doesn't sure. But the Greeks do. That is at the very heart of this situation.

Have you read the article before posting?

That same report says that failure of the economy to recover is caused by the failure of the government to implement the necessary changes, worsened by the current government during the past 5 months.

That’s one way to put it. The other is that besides the government IMF fucked up too by setting unrealistic goals, like a 4% surplus by 2016 which led Tsipras denying continuation of the program to avoid further damage to the economy (those goals were eventually reduced but it now seems too little too late). Everyone is looking for a scapegoat. The government is blaming ECB and the Germans, EU is blaming the government, and IMF is blaming everyone including Lagarde who can’t seem to get her head out of her ass. Then there is US who see what a clustefuck this whole situation is but can’t do anything but nagging the Germans to become a bit more flexible and in order to put some pressure on them decided to make the report public just when Tsipras abandoned negotiations.

There is a Greek proverb saying that when too many roosters sign the dawn comes late.

Well, IMF has to explain why it threw billions of dollars to an unsustainable debt.

But there are deeper issues too. What the creditors really want is to micromanage Greece while they do not understand our economy and culture. They want to change everything in a couple of years. Change takes time, you can't turn a Greek into a German or an American in 3 or 5 years.

In order to do this and protect their interests, they support the previous, crooked goverments. These people acted like lapdogs, signing everything the creditors threw at them, whilst implementing only what didn't touch their rich friends.

The creditors did not only got binding agreements through them but also protection. Siemens for example, the German conglomerate that accounts for a large percentage of Germany's GDP has spent over 2 billion euros (!) in bribery to Greek politicians and public servants. If this case ever reached the court, both our politicians would face jail and Siemens wouldn't be able to work with the European public sector again (think from traffic lights, to trains, hospitals, energy, etc). Thus the creditors prefer a goverment that looks like an obedient and honest goverment, whilst it only applies austerity measures for the weak and protect themselves.

Our new goverment seems genuinely interested to make things better, but it asks for the freedom to implement their own ideas in order to reach the targets set by our creditors and also a debt restructure so that our debt becomes sustainable.

Just for the record I have to say that as a fellow Greek I totally disagree with that line of thinking, which is popular amongst many Greeks. Neither IMF nor EU did anything to cover our corruptive politicians. But they can’t substitute our constitution or our courts. Neither is their duty to govern Greece. Their duty is to set goals and check whether we implement agreeable reforms. Everything else is just conspiracy theories or pure speculations. They don’t have executive jurisdiction to enforce implementation of this or that policy.

You mentioned the Siemens scandal for example, by the way your numbers are off by an order of magnitude. This is a typical example of a cover-up from our part. We let the key witness escape to Germany where he is protected from extradition. It’s not their fault, we shouldn’t have let him leave in the first place. Taking responsibility for our mistakes would be a first step in overcoming our inefficiencies. And the previous government was anything but obedient, as a matter of fact all three governments that were called to implement reforms resisted as much as they could.

So please, let’s just stop the speculation about EU wanting to rule Greece through puppet governments. I’m sure they have better things to do.

      Siemens for example [...] has spent over 2 billion euros (!) in bribery to Greek politicians and public servants.

Can you please substantiate this outrageous claim? The Wikipedia page [1] mentions approx €150k.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens_Greek_bribery_scandal