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Comment by junto | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, the vast majority of the bailouts have gone to paying back debts. Those debts were held with corporate German and foreign banks.

And here is the kicker; Those debts are now held by the ECB, which, is not supposed to be a lender of last resort, but now has become one by default. The corporate banks are now safe and have extricated themselves from the risky position they found themselves in 5 years ago.

The ECB doesn't care either way. Schauble secretly welcomes a Grexit, because without external support Greece can't move to a new Drachma. The logistics are just impossible by themselves. Schauble wants the rest of the Eurozone to witness what will happen when you exit the Euro without support (it won't be pretty).

Hi there France btw. You still like you early retirement, large civil service employment, string unions and social state? Well, you're number one on their hit list.

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> To be fair, the vast majority of the bailouts have gone to paying back debts. Those debts were held with corporate German and foreign banks.

Let me cite from another economist, Hans-Werner Sinn:

"At that time (late March 2010), French banks had a 53 billion euro exposure to private and public instances in Greece, the German ones a 33-billion euro exposure, the US 10 billion, and the UK 9 billion. [....] At the end of March 2015, the sum of current account deficits accumulated since early 2008 was 108 billion euros, equivalent to one-third of the multilateral and intergovernmental loans provided to Greece, which amounted to 325 billion euros. Two-thirds of the public credit was thus apparently used to finance capital flight and one-third to finance the current account deficit – ultimately the living standard that could no longer be financed with the income of the Greek citizenry. Thus, over the entire crisis period it can hardly be argued that barely 10 percent of the public credit benefited the Greek people, as Finance Minister Varoufakis does. Apart from the above, Greek debtors benefited from the fact that the international community helped them meet their obligations towards foreign creditors, and also made it possible for them to bring their wealth out of the country."

> Hi there France btw. You still like you early retirement, large civil service employment, string unions and social state? Well, you're number one on their hit list.

Hi there, I'm from France and I would love to see all of the above gone. Any idea when this will happen?

Yes, Varoufakis mentioned: "Based on months of negotiation, my conviction is that the German finance minister wants Greece to be pushed out of the single currency to put the fear of God into the French and have them accept his model of a disciplinarian eurozone." (http://yanisvaroufakis.eu/2015/07/11/behind-germanys-refusal...)

A bit like nuking Japan was the first shot in US's Cold War against USSR. (But fortunately not as immediately violent.)

I find it frightening that someone in their government tries to pull such strings to enforce economic views.

The analogy with actual war is I think far less unreasonable that it at first sounds. I-don't-know-who said "The First World War was fought with guns, the Second World War was fought with tanks, the Third World War will be fought with banks."

I don't mean to say that this is any kind of tinderbox situation. But it is crystal clear to me that it's at the very least a first-world country being forced by a hegemon into neo-colonial vassal-hood/debt bondage, something that is quite shocking to see, especially when there are no standing armies in sight.

And the violence is real, in that Greece is suffering a humanitarian crisis that will only deepen. Actual people will die prematurely, and others' lives will be wrecked, for Schaeuble's example to pay off, as much as newspapers like to abstract this fact behind phrases like "deep pension cuts".

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