After years of pain and humiliation Greece may exit Euro AND EU... PVC says...

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

...I told you so.

Back in 2008 I argued that Greece should be ejected from the Euro so that it's currency could be devalued and its lending situation normalised. This would, I argued, be extremely painful in the short term but better in the medium and long term.

I was widely scoffed at.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-33164924

"Failure to reach an agreement would... mark the beginning of a painful course that would lead initially to a Greek default and ultimately to the country's exit from the euro area and, most likely, from the European Union," the Bank of Greece said in a report.

So... I was right, Greece has spent seven years in depression and now looks likely to exit the Euro anyway, and the acrimony means it may also exit the EU.

Well. Done. Team.

[rory_20_uk]

Fingers crossed they keep up the good work!

by 2050 it might end up as a Nordic Alliance which has a chance of working.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

It won't work until they either kick out Germany or Germany annexes everyone else.

[Crandar]

Nah, Greece will remain in EU, at least for now.
CORAL is a deeply pro-EU party, completely afraid of doing anything that could be characterized as revolutionary.

[wooly_mammoth]

It has always baffled me how human communities choose to be led by the biggest idiots available at the time of the election. I'd say the guys in the current greek government are up there on par with, or perhaps even beyond, the imbeciles we have in Romania. Met a random greek in an airport a couple of weeks ago and had a chat, asked him about the "real" situation since I tend to distrust the distortions made by the mass-media, but he confirmed that it's pretty bad for the average person or youngsters entering the field of work.

I know these problems are older, but then the more so, if things are bad why would you put a bunch of populist incompetents in charge?

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

Well, the current Greek government has a poisoned chalice, the current budget, savagely cut from 2008, is causing the Greek economy to shrink faster than the debt, so although they're lowering the debt in Euro's it's actually rising as a percentage of GDP. So when the Greek government says "we can't make any more cuts" they're right. As it is the shrinking economy is forcing more people onto welfare, more cuts to public services will further raise the welfare bill.

It's a vicious circle, and it requires a default and return to the Drachma, then in ten years Greece will be much better off. The sad thing is that if this inevitably had been acknowledged in 2009 then Greece would ALREADY be better off.

I blame Germany and the Netherlands for this, followed by Belgium and France.

[Papewaio]

All based on a messed up excel spreadsheet cell.

Oops our austerity conclusions was based on a wrong formula! Oh well it lined up with our bias so well let's double down on the stupidity...

[Kralizec]

PVC, I distinctly recal you used to say that Greece "should be helped leaving the Euro" or "should be allowed to leave it". Your current way of phrasing is more correct - most Greeks want to stay in the Eurozone, including all their major parties, which is why leaving was never on the table before.

IIRC by the turn of last year (just before the elections) Greece's economy had started to grow again. Greece's debt mostly has extremely low interest rates and long maturity, so it would have been doable (although still not easily).

Instead Greece is stuck with a government that doesn't even want to enact pension age reforms that would bring Greece in line with the rest of Europe - norms which one Syriza member even compared to sub-Saharan Africa.

[Gilrandir]

It has always baffled me how human communities choose to be led by the biggest idiots available at the time of the election. I'd say the guys in the current greek government are up there on par with, or perhaps even beyond, the imbeciles we have in Romania.

PR and modern election technologies.

Met a random greek in an airport a couple of weeks ago and had a chat, asked him about the "real" situation since I tend to distrust the distortions made by the mass-media, but he confirmed that it's pretty bad for the average person or youngsters entering the field of work.

So you think that media distort things, but "random guy at the airport" sees the whole picture correctly?

[wooly_mammoth]

After several personal experiences where I witnessed for myself the two parallel dimensions, namely the "real" reality and the reality manufactured by the press, yes, I'm ready to put more weight on some random guy's opinion on the facts than on what the mass-media says.

[Sarmatian]

...I told you so.

Back in 2008 I argued that Greece should be ejected from the Euro so that it's currency could be devalued and its lending situation normalised. This would, I argued, be extremely painful in the short term but better in the medium and long term.

I was widely scoffed at.

And rightly so.

So... I was right, Greece has spent seven years in depression and now looks likely to exit the Euro anyway, and the acrimony means it may also exit the EU.

Well. Done. Team.

Would you care to explain why would Greece be better off?

[a completely inoffensive name]

The bankers get what they want. This is why the EU vision was dead from day 1.

[Brenus]

"After all that it looks like the Greek government would rather bow than accept leaving the Euro, so the pain continues, Greeks get poorer and the EU is even further from genuine, meaningful, reform." Not yet. Don't trust media that told you the Yes vote was leading... They had it wrong once, they might have it again.
BTW, read what the Greek Parliament voted for. You might be surprised, and probably find out that the description offered by your link is at least, misinforming or plain and blunt lies.
It put the last decision in EU hands, whatever the outcome will...

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

Brenus, can you please stop posting like Yoda? I know you can manage English syntax better than that.

If it's all lies I'd like a counter-link, please, because from where I'm sitting they basically agreed to all the things rejected in the referendum, pension cuts, tax rises and sell-off of state assets.

[Sarmatian]

Brenus, can you please stop posting like Yoda? I know you can manage English syntax better than that.

If it's all lies I'd like a counter-link, please, because from where I'm sitting they basically agreed to all the things rejected in the referendum, pension cuts, tax rises and sell-off of state assets.

It's really difficult to tell without knowing the exact wording, because it isn't all that simple. For instance, IMF wanted to raise the pension age to 67 iirc - Greek government agreed to that but wanted it to start in 2022, or something like that.

Everyone understands that there's a need for serious reforms in Greece. The Greek government wants them to be a little less severe and implemented gradually over the next 10-15 years while creditors want them implemented yesterday.

[Husar]

So if I have a relatively low income and already took a credit of 100k€, and then I go to my bank, will they give me another credit of 20k€?

And if they do and I end up unable to pay it back, is it entirely my fault?

This is what happens when you are too optimistic, you only get disappointed...

People gave Greece and homeowners more money than they should have given them and now they demand their money back because the bonus payments for exceptional performance are due.

[a completely inoffensive name]

What the hell was the Greek government trying to do. Just leave and rebuild, who is going to look kindly on a party that defied a clear mandate from the people?

[Fragony]

What the hell was the Greek government trying to do. Just leave and rebuild, who is going to look kindly on a party that defied a clear mandate from the people?

Ask the Dutch and French as well as the Greeks. The EU just calls it something else and pushes things through anyway without any democracy involved. The European constitution was renamed to the Lissabon treaty, it's exactly the same thing but French and Dutch referendums could be ignored. Greece is so screwed. They have no choice but lending money to pay their debts, which sucks them down even more. In the meantime the vultures are circling over all their state-owned possesions. Talk about a heist.

[Montmorency]

What the hell was the Greek government trying to do. Just leave and rebuild, who is going to look kindly on a party that defied a clear mandate from the people?

Well, here's a rundown:

1. Greece economy . Germany won't help because Germany doesn't want to pay for its continental empire the way America has historically done.
2. Syriza elected in Greece on basis of maintaining Euro AND avoiding austerity.
3. EU/Euro is predicated on economic and cultural union while (nominally) maintaining national sovereignty.
4. In previous negotiations, it was always government vs. government. Here, Tsipras called out a referendum to make it more explicitly (German) government vs. (Greek) nation - IOW, testing the limits of the sovereignty principle in modern Europe.
5. Germany doesn't want to take sovereign responsibility, but neither does it want Greece to leave the Euro. And as previously-stated, just forgiving the debt is too risky (from a German national perspective).
5.a. Please don't forget that Germany has always had nationalist governments since reunification, even if it was too subtle for some to see (or if they chose to ignore it).
6. Germany takes a chunk out of the sovereignty principle by demanding supra-national (read: German) administrative intervention to guarantee that Greece does what is best for the European community (read: Germany).
7. Hot vote but Greek parliament passes the deal.
8. Germany has to ratify in the next day.

Again, Syriza/Tsipras had no real alternatives. They were between a rock and a hard place.

It's funny, but basically he was playing realpolitik. There was no way he could actually get the people what they wanted, or even anything close to something his own party could endorse (hence the schism in the parliamentary vote), but the idea was just to prompt a new schedule for negotiating negotiations and to get European money flowing back in just in time to make the debt payments in July (20) and August necessary to prevent complete economic collapse and Grexit.