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Comment by dantheman | Hacker News Reader

The transfers to greece of the last few years were to a large extent a way of transferring private debt of german and french banks to the general EU populace.

Overall, I agree - greece needs to get its house in order and that involves making tough decisions, cutting jobs, lowering benefits, etc. They don't have the revenue to support the quality of life that they want to provide.

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    The transfers to greece of the last few years were to a large extent a way of transferring private debt of german and french banks to the general EU populace.

This is just not the case. Only about 1/3 of the bailout money went this way (and certainly not to the "general EU populace", only to some european tax payers). The remaining 2/3 went to Greek consumption in some form or other. It is estimated that 1/3 of the bailout money went to off-shore accounts.

Moreover, taking on Greek debt is a massive gift to Greece, for this money no longer needs to be paid back, hence is a gift.

I'd be very interested in sources for this.

Sinn, Hans-Werner, "The Greek Tragedy", CESifo Forum 16 Special Issue 2015 (June), 2015, 5-35, downloadable from

https://www.cesifo-group.de/de/ifoHome/publications/docbase/...

It's not a matter of quality of life, its a matter of a sustainable debt. Increasing dramatically the taxation is killing the private sector which is the one that produced profits.

They have ~25% unemployment - over 50% for youth... it seems like they already did plenty of that.

Actually, no. Their labour market is extremely rigid, which is precisely one of the things that everybody wants them to fix -- and what they don't want to fix.

Making economic decision that cut growth chances in the near/mid future doesn't help to lower the GDP/debt ratio, and that's why the recent reforms asked by the EU failed in improving Greek economic status.

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