Athens burns as Greece bailout passed

[hey]

Are you joking? Didn't the entire populace vote against this overwhelmingly a few months ago and now the government turns around to pass said bailout? When a democratic nation/republic ignores the will of it's people the people are SUPPOSED to be angry.

By that logic we should still have slavery.

The job of a government is not to do whatever the majority want.

[Mayareira]

I do agree that governments should listen to its people when necessary. However, they should really try to analyze the situation they are in. Massive military spendings, pouring state money on unnecessary stuff, excessive salary bonuses, retirement at 40s...

Annually 550M Euros for 40,000 unmarried/divorced daughters of dead civil servants? Way to fuck up your own social security system. I mean, didn't they see that coming?

These should all come to an end. I'd really try to sympathize if we were talking about a devastating situation but...yeah, these cuts seem to be bringing their welfare down to the level of the rest of the European average.

Setting citizens cars on fire, burning restaurants, cafe's isn't a good way of protesting. What the hell do you want from random citizens who are probably suffering the same shit you are going through?

[Correction]

Pointless protest is pointless. Good job at deal further economic damage to a country that is trying to recover.

Let's try to separate the protesters from the rioting pillagers hm?

[Elvis]

By that logic we should still have slavery.

The job of a government is not to do whatever the majority want.

I agree with this statement.

It evokes, what I think is - a moral truism. Not sure if that's what you were going for though.

[RKenshin]

I might be missing something big somewhere, but really... what choice does Greece have?

Their government's spending is far higher than their revenue, and that is only escalated further by their plummeting economy/GDP.

If they accept the debt deal, they'll have to remove a lot of the spending, increase (and actually enforce) revenue, but can at least continue to run a small deficit so that the cuts/rev increase aren't so drastic.

If they don't accept the debt deal and instead default, I can't see anything other than country falling apart. No one would lend them money, and if they do the interest rates will be insane, and if they print their own currency it won't be worth poop, and they'll be in an even worse situation where they're forced to either cut out deficit spending completely or just fail.

[Mazmaz]

Is that what the "financial experts" say?

[Correction]

If they don't accept the debt deal and instead default, I can't see anything other than country falling apart. No one would lend them money, and if they do the interest rates will be insane, and if they print their own currency it won't be worth poop, and they'll be in an even worse situation where they're forced to either cut out deficit spending completely or just fail.

Argentina survived (kinda) a foreign debt default. The key ingredient here is a government that gives a shit about nurturing local industries to the point where they can provide growth, rather than treating domestic business as a piggy bank from which they can extort all the money they need to pay off their support base and party elites.

Which means the third option for Greece here is a popular uprising, replacing the existing government and getting lucky with the next few leaders who take over once the drachma is restored and people are disallowed from withdrawing their bank accounts for a year or more.

[Gwynplaine]

I might be missing something big somewhere, but really... what choice does Greece have?

Evading reality instead of dealing with it. If you just believe and clap your hands hard enough, the debt will go away! Money isn't real you know, it's just subjective digital numbers. Plus the markets are all about fear plus blind panic, or inexplicable confidence. So as long as people feel like the economy is good then it won't be otherwise!

(for the sake of internet clarity, yes its all sarcasm on my part but that's what the alternatives all boil down to)

[RKenshin]

Is that what the "financial experts" say?

More just a basic guesstimation; which is why I asked what I could be missing.

Argentina survived (kinda) a foreign debt default. The key ingredient here is a government that gives a shit about nurturing local industries to the point where they can provide growth, rather than treating domestic business as a piggy bank from which they can extort all the money they need to pay off their support base and party elites.

Which means the third option for Greece here is a popular uprising, replacing the existing government and getting lucky with the next few leaders who take over once the drachma is restored and people are disallowed from withdrawing their bank accounts for a year or more.

Problem I see with this comparison is, as far as I know about the Greece economy, they don't actually export all that many goods.

[Mazmaz]

Didn't people say Greece has defaulted multiple times in the past? How did they work their way up to social paradise of retiring at age 40 with awesome pensions if all they're known for is defaulting?

[Drex]

Didn't people say Greece has defaulted multiple times in the past? How did they work their way up to social paradise of retiring at age 40 with awesome pensions if all they're known for is defaulting?

Paying high interest rates and hiding how much they are borrowing. No individual lender knew how much debt they had, so they were getting way more debt than they would have if their financials were in the open. On top of that, the interest rates were still high because of their checkered past, but they went ahead and hid how large their interest payments were getting so no one would know how bad it was.

[RKenshin]

Didn't people say Greece has defaulted multiple times in the past? How did they work their way up to social paradise of retiring at age 40 with awesome pensions if all they're known for is defaulting?

News to me.

But if true, in some ways that actually would make sense they have a history of fiscal irresponsibility.

I do remember some hearsay I never looked into confirming as fact or not... that apparently they barely 'qualified' to join the Euro initially because of some issues with debt, and in some ways even fudged the books so they could join (again, no idea if that is true or exaggerated or not).

Why they're still able to borrow? Who knows.

[Drex]

Anyone can borrow if they offer a high enough interest rate to investors willing to take a risk. As long as they were hiding how bad their debt was getting, they looked a lot less risky than even a lot of US stocks. "Hey, maybe they figured this debt thing out this time around, their deficit is reasonable enough for the EU to accept them-oh fuck, they got me again."

[Gwynplaine]

There was a really great article I read long ago about how finances and money are handled in Greece, let me find it.

Edit: Here it is. It's from 2010 and it's a very long article but it's totally intriguing. Some of the revealing bits.
http://www.vanityfair.com/business/f...g-bonds-201010

Where waste ends and theft begins almost doesn’t matter; the one masks and thus enables the other. It’s simply assumed, for instance, that anyone who is working for the government is meant to be bribed. People who go to public health clinics assume they will need to bribe doctors to actually take care of them. Government ministers who have spent their lives in public service emerge from office able to afford multi-million-dollar mansions and two or three country homes.

As it turned out, what the Greeks wanted to do, once the lights went out and they were alone in the dark with a pile of borrowed money, was turn their government into a piñata stuffed with fantastic sums and give as many citizens as possible a whack at it. In just the past decade the wage bill of the Greek public sector has doubled, in real terms—and that number doesn’t take into account the bribes collected by public officials. The average government job pays almost three times the average private-sector job. The national railroad has annual revenues of 100 million euros against an annual wage bill of 400 million, plus 300 million euros in other expenses. The average state railroad employee earns 65,000 euros a year. Twenty years ago a successful businessman turned minister of finance named Stefanos Manos pointed out that it would be cheaper to put all Greece’s rail passengers into taxicabs: it’s still true. “We have a railroad company which is bankrupt beyond comprehension,” Manos put it to me. “And yet there isn’t a single private company in Greece with that kind of average pay.” The Greek public-school system is the site of breathtaking inefficiency: one of the lowest-ranked systems in Europe, it nonetheless employs four times as many teachers per pupil as the highest-ranked, Finland’s. Greeks who send their children to public schools simply assume that they will need to hire private tutors to make sure they actually learn something. There are three government-owned defense companies: together they have billions of euros in debts, and mounting losses. The retirement age for Greek jobs classified as “arduous” is as early as 55 for men and 50 for women. As this is also the moment when the state begins to shovel out generous pensions, more than 600 Greek professions somehow managed to get themselves classified as arduous: hairdressers, radio announcers, waiters, musicians, and on and on and on. The Greek public health-care system spends far more on supplies than the European average—and it is not uncommon, several Greeks tell me, to see nurses and doctors leaving the job with their arms filled with paper towels and diapers and whatever else they can plunder from the supply closets.

“The Greek people never learned to pay their taxes. And they never did because no one is punished. No one has ever been punished. It’s a cavalier offense—like a gentleman not opening a door for a lady.” The scale of Greek tax cheating was at least as incredible as its scope: an estimated two-thirds of Greek doctors reported incomes under 12,000 euros a year—which meant, because incomes below that amount weren’t taxable, that even plastic surgeons making millions a year paid no tax at all. The problem wasn’t the law—there was a law on the books that made it a jailable offense to cheat the government out of more than 150,000 euros—but its enforcement. “If the law was enforced,” the tax collector said, “every doctor in Greece would be in jail.” I laughed, and he gave me a stare. “I am completely serious.”

[Ragnus]

Jesus Christ. If Republicans need an example to keep themselves from having a hemorrhage over Obama then they only need to look to Greece.

tl:dr; Greece is the Donald Trump of nations.

I'm going to laugh and then cry horribly when that man dies and the economy goes belly up because of his decades of debt accrual.