The Eurozone Crisis Thread

ruffly 90 purr scent of bale out munney went to banx not greeeeece

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/7/1/greek-bailout-money-went-to-banks-not-greece.html

now that's how you grow a national economy

lol Wotan tbf

omg to banx! I fot it went to the govt and then to ministers and then straight to the poor well the scales well and truly etc now

financial depressions are hilarious! 25% unemployment is funny!

http://www.tradingeconomics.com/greece/unemployment-rate

lol @ greece!

wait

if we agree not to lol at Greece, if we were lolling at Greece, then its going to be OK for Greece?

and you say Naomi Klein told you this?

man that's fucked up she should really be more careful about what she puts out there

everything is going to be okay for everyone forever as long as we continue privatizing profits and socializing losses

^ grown up serious ppl making shit happen

tch tch stop laughing at Greece

darraghnebb

This is the least justified position of condescension since Raccoon Tanuki in his early 2015 prime.

lol milo

I for one am glad that someone is finally speaking truth to power

I'm....not sure what valuable discussion I've been detailing here by offering dissent at what seemed a suitable level for the audience at the time. flopson and xxxyyyz haven't posted all day and all matt offers is rote meta zing based on obscure jol beef.

the rest pff

rote meta zing based on obscure jol beef

wait I thought this was your schtick

Hey, hold on, Jol Out has made it across the Atlantic?

xyzzzz was the 1st person to respond to you d

I know but not since then, besides I've an email from him circuitously provoking me about sf that I want to consider in full before responding

lol at jol out travelling power

OK I'll take evening off from thread I promise God bless all here

Ah ok it's just not always 100% clear where the "of course I'm being asinine what do you expect talking to these plebs" section starts exactly

Legitimately think there could be a Brexit now after this. You've got the UKIP crowd, and a decent chunk of Tories who want out. Their position will be unchanged, although some Eurosceptic Tories are up in arms about the treatment of Greece from a national sovereignty point of view - e.g. that vile MEP Dan Hannon.

There's always been the old left anti-EU crowd, - Tony Benn and that - although fairly insignificant in recent years, there will no doubt be an upswing in left-motivated anti-EU sentiment. In Scotland anyway I'm seeing a lot of disillusion from left-wing internationalist, pro-independence, erstwhile pro-EU types.

Yes, fuck this shower of free market shitheels.

Kinda feel that Brits have to get really desperate before voting against status quo - fear that you personally might be worse off tends to trump all other concerns, cf well you know

Darragh I was j/k. I don't mention sf to get a rise out of you - they are part of the wider picture.

what a tool

― licorice oratorio (baaderonixx), Monday, 13 July 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Are you going to explain this? Varoufakis isn't ofering any solutions and I know the guy's personality rubs off wrong - and I'm sure plenty would deny the picture he paints of the discussions he took part in - but from that interview you have to deal with the fundamental problem. Do the Greeks get tied under an auserity program until 2059 or whatever?

I doubt this is over. i) this might not get through, ii) even if it does it will be hard to implement, especially given that Syriza have a strong mandate. A bunch of broken-up, discredited technocrats aren't going to simply run with the show overnight.

Podemos and the like are looking at what Germany is doing and they now will have other negotiating tactics when trying to 'step out of line'. In the long-term the ideals of solidarity that a lot of people have given to this European project were damaged last night.

what are the odds on the Greek Parliament not accepting this ridiculous "deal"

Xp - well from the rest of your post we obviously have very different takes on this but beyond that Varoufakis has consistently made this whole thing to be about him. "They just couldn't get what I was telling them, they were out there to get me, read my blog for more details", while not taking a single initiative domestically. Oh and had time for a nice glossy vanity photo shoot with wifey but couldn't be bother coming to parliament to vote on one of the most decisive votes in its modern history cause he had a party to go on his island with his daughter. *SORRY :))*
To be fair, this often happens when academics get involved in politics and are afraid to get their hands dirty, but Varoufakis never really tried to get off his patronising high horse

I partly agree - Tsipras is the politician (Varoufakis isn't even a member of Syriza). From that article he has done a lot of advising and has been bruised and taken out by people who do the dirty work. But again he did put in the hours at the negotiating table to try and work it out. Tough to know what is the best course. Syriza are an odd coalition of people, not all of whom are politicians and technocrats - that is a good thing, but it shows. A lot of the left on Twitter are criticising their tactics, but they didn't win votes and Syriza were able to.

That explanation for not taking part doesn't put him in the best light however he had a diff take on the situation and so not entirely surprising he was going to abstain from voting.

Indeed Varoufakis seems like a self-promoting blowhard but that hardly renders him out of place in European politics. Maybe he was right, maybe he wasn't, but in the end he wasn't even supported by his own party.

I can also report me and Darragh are fine, judging from email I just got :-)

judas

Dunno how much this will affect the UK referendum tbh. Fiscal conservatives will be happy that Greece has been railroaded into "getting its house in order". Those on the left will wonder whether the austerity agenda of the EU is materially worse than the austerity agenda of Osborne et al. Eurosceptics gonna Eurosceptic, as before. As wins says, people have to feel a direct imminent threat or benefit before ditching the status quo.

parallels imo btwn Collins/dev and the treaty in tsipras/varoufakis?

Man, some of the comments... what did people expect, that Greece (and everybody else from then on) wouldn't have to pay back any of its debt and that the free billions would keep on coming without any attempt at changing the bottomless pit nature of the Greek economy? It's easy to be generous with someone else's money...

Oh, and media people: yes, that Krugman guy won some major prize, years ago. That doesn't mean he is always right about everything.

BTW, of course I'm not blind for the emo arguments abput the suffering citizens. But if I don't pay my bills, my kids gets evicted too.

That is moronic.

household spending /= govt spending. any deal without debt relief is almost just managed decline for greece ny this point. let's let it sink slowly into the sea

It's easy to be generous with someone else's money...

great phrase bro, is it one of your own? You're clearly an original thinker.

The whole point is that austerity has depressed the Greek economy to the extent that it's made it less, not more, likely to be able to pay it's debts. Even allowing for the incompetent nature of successive Greek governments and the barely functional nature of its tax system.

If we're going to throw around accusations of childish behaviour, the response of the EU/ECB to this point, which has been made by multiple economists admittedly less knowledgeable than the guy responsible for 'Keep the Meme Alive: Pippa's Arse', has been to stick their fingers in their ears and go 'ner ner ner ner ner not listening'.

You would think the EU would be more alert to the geopolitical dangers of creating a failed state with rapidly growing fascist parties in a region of massive historical instability as well, but apparently not.

Perhaps if Greece's creditors weren't prepared to accept the risk of default / debt cancellation, then they shouldn't have been charging interest in the first place.

It's also worth emphasising that it is those same creditors, in the form of the Troika, that are responsible for enforcing the punitive settlement on Greece. Under most circumstances bad debts get written off, and creditors have to bear the moral risk of lending that money. I agree that analogy with household debt is often unhelpful, but one parallel holds good: no creditor can force a bankrupt household to come up with money it doesn't have, just as most formally bankrupt states throughout history (including Germany in both the 1920s and 1950s) tend to have bankrupting debts written off or restructured, something that the Troika seem totally unwilling to countenance. This course of action will have the counter-productive effect Matt writes about above, a disaster for the Eurozone and Europe more generally.

But, y'know, "maybe Greece shouldn't have run up such a big credit card bill!!!"

I enjoy a crap analogy as much as the next guy but in if I don't pay my bills, my kids gets evicted too to what is eviction analogous?

won't someone please think of the imaginary children???

I don't know much about the Belgian welfare state but I'm assuming the result of said eviction wouldn't be the kids starving on the streets?

some low shots here - StanM partly right, some of the post-game victory speeches after the referendum were just stupid - why would anyone think that creditors would agree to a third bailout and debt cancellation without any type of commitment from Greece? Don't see what's childish about pointing out that Greece put itself in this mess (and we're not talking just about a small corrupt governing clique, whole country has been living on absurdly easy credit for the last 15 years and dug its own grave with the Olympics - doesnt mean they have to be punished for all of eternity but still some of the OXI camp seems to think that this whole mess just came out of the blue).
Agree with Matt tho that it's still very questionable, even from the creditors pov, that extra austerity would bring recovery and ultimately get them their money back (see Piketty's analysis for instance) but just dismissing the creditors as evil capitalists with an austerity fetish does not help.

it doesn't help but it's true

BTW, of course I'm not blind for the emo arguments abput the suffering citizens. But if I don't pay my bills, my kids gets evicted too.

― StanM, Tuesday, 14 July 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The Tories say this kind of stuff all the time.

xxp how is it "the whole country"'s fault that Greece was offered easy credit by irresponsible creditors? Were ordinary Greeks expected to demand higher interest rates on the basis that they could foresee this kind of disaster? And the Olympics might have been a folly, but that can hardly explain the situation that Greece finds itself in now.

eurozone only thread badly wanted

aux armes etcetera

http://marianamazzucato.com/2015/07/13/greece-and-the-eu-a-macro-and-micro-mess-up/

^ this is a good piece - shows how Germany et al. were more than happy to get Greece to accumulate debt and now are willing to keep them in a depressed state for as long it takes. Whatever it means.

zone policing

I agree that analogy with household debt is often unhelpful, but one parallel holds good: no creditor can force a bankrupt household to come up with money it doesn't have,

Yeah. There used to be a way, or at least a more punitive measure, which was debtor's prisons- obviously a great way to ensure payment of debts, that, sticking people in chokey.

Not sure if any of those making household credit card analogies would look back on that system fondly... but idk, maybe they would. Maybe that's going to be the next big thing for the right. Anyway, conditions imposed on Greece more analagous to being locked in Marshalsea with Chalres Dickens' dad, than any normal kind of bankruptcy proceedings.