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Severity of Greek Austerity Measures

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Comments

  • Closed Accounts Posts: 905 ✭✭✭easychair


    The real problem is that French, German and Dutch banks have lent €130 billion to the Greek Government that they have no hope of getting back. The EU leaders are more concerned about their domestic positions than the wider problem in the Eurozone, and that dichotomy is likely to become more acute as time ticks on.

    BNP Paribas is in for €37 billion, Commerzabank €15 billion, and the EU leaders think they can solve what is an economic crises by force of political will. The discussion is not about how to repay these debts, but is more about concealing it and hoping it will go away. Mervyn King believes that the political inaction on the actual problem, rather than posturing about the symptoms, can last for, at most, about two more years, leaving the Euro economies stagnant and the position worsening, with the possibility of an implosion.

    Italy’s economy hasn’t grown in 10 years, and it’s unlikely Greece can do better than that, and probably it will do worse.

    The desperation to prop up the Euro will be exposed for the folly it is, and the damage done in the meantime will be untold.

    It is a brave man who can predict anything with any degree of certainty, and the strains between the Euro countries will become more and more apparent.


  • Banned (with Prison Access) Posts: 8,224 ✭✭✭Going Forward




  • Registered Users Posts: 19,015 ✭✭✭✭murphaph


    cyberhog wrote: »
    Germany has been in the same situation as Greece in the past and it was only because of the sacrifices of the United States that Germany was able to rebuild its economy.
    Do you know what life was like in post war Germany? The Marshall aid didn't see the average German out buying property. It kept the average German fed and allowed German companies to rebuild.

    Germany wasn't handed its country back on a plate after the war. It took many years of 6 day weeks and 12 hour days of work by average Germans (who may retire at 68 by the way) to rebuild their country and actually REPAY with interest the Marshall aid they received. The United States didn't really sacrifice anything. They made loans which were repaid with interest.

    Greece is not the same at all. They have received credit which they do not wish to repay in full. They do not work as long as Germans (or Americans for that matter) nor do they pay as much tax. I would say it's morally wrong for Greece to receive any breaks so long as they may retire so early.


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 535 ✭✭✭Skopzz


    murphaph wrote: »
    Do you know what life was like in post war Germany? The Marshall aid didn't see the average German out buying property. It kept the average German fed and allowed German companies to rebuild.

    Germany wasn't handed its country back on a plate after the war. It took many years of 6 day weeks and 12 hour days of work by average Germans (who may retire at 68 by the way) to rebuild their country and actually REPAY with interest the Marshall aid they received. The United States didn't really sacrifice anything. They made loans which were repaid with interest.

    Greece is not the same at all. They have received credit which they do not wish to repay in full. They do not work as long as Germans (or Americans for that matter) nor do they pay as much tax. I would say it's morally wrong for Greece to receive any breaks so long as they may retire so early.

    The biggest help however was the Allied creation of the current German constitution. The true cost of protecting Germany during the Cold War was over two trillion dollars. Without such a massive expenditure by the American Taxpayer, it could be argued that Germany might have been Putin’s plaything. But, German sensibilities would preclude such an acknowledgment. The trillions of dollars the American middle class has spent protecting your sorry a-- was and is the basis of your prosperity. The single currency allows Germany to essentially borrow at a vastly lower interest rate than market without having to actually borrow or even print the physical cash.

    We should not forget that when the financial crisis broke out in 2008, about 30% of the billions of American dollars poured into AIG to cover its insurance obligations found their way into German banks that AIG had insured. Germany never acknowledged that transfer of funds that were crucial to prevent the German financial system from collapsing. You should be grateful for all this.

    I should mention the Anglo Irish Bank bailout by the Irish taxpayers. The Irish never consented to guaranteeing the German bondholders of our banks yet you expect us to pay 32% of our GDP to speculators based in Germany and across Europe and the US. I find it amazing how you then oppose the ECB from keeping our interest rates low - if Germany had yields above 6% you would be crying out loud for an ECB bazooka.


  • Registered Users Posts: 19,015 ✭✭✭✭murphaph


    Skopzz wrote: »
    The biggest help however was the Allied creation of the current German constitution. The true cost of protecting Germany during the Cold War was over two trillion dollars. Without such a massive expenditure by the American Taxpayer, it could be argued that Germany might have been Putin’s plaything. But, German sensibilities would preclude such an acknowledgment. The trillions of dollars the American middle class has spent protecting your sorry a-- was and is the basis of your prosperity. The single currency allows Germany to essentially borrow at a vastly lower interest rate than market without having to actually borrow or even print the physical cash.

    We should not forget that when the financial crisis broke out in 2008, about 30% of the billions of American dollars poured into AIG to cover its insurance obligations found their way into German banks that AIG had insured. Germany never acknowledged that transfer of funds that were crucial to prevent the German financial system from collapsing. You should be grateful for all this.

    I should mention the Anglo Irish Bank bailout by the Irish taxpayers. The Irish never consented to guaranteeing the German bondholders of our banks yet you expect us to pay 32% of our GDP to speculators based in Germany and across Europe and the US. I find it amazing how you then oppose the ECB from keeping our interest rates low - if Germany had yields above 6% you would be crying out loud for an ECB bazooka.
    You've made some amazing assumptions about my thoughts on many various issues there.

    Firstly, I'm not German. I'm Irish. I just live in Germany.

    This thread is about Greece. I never mentioned my feelings about Ireland, yet you have stated:
    The Irish never consented to guaranteeing the German bondholders of our banks yet you expect us to pay 32% of our GDP to speculators based in Germany and across Europe and the US
    I mean, wtf?

    I actually think the blanket guarantee was an amazing mistake. I believe Ireland should have created a state bank to carry out the basic banking functions such as cheque clearance and so on and I'd have let Anglo, AIB, BoI and the whole lot of them go to the wall and if they took down German banks with them then so be it: private banks should never be bailed out by public money.

    You say Germany was "protected" during the cold war. The US did not station missiles and troops in Europe to protect Europeans. They placed them there to be able to hit the USSR faster than the USSR could hit the Americans. That's why the US reacted so badly when the USSR tried to "protect" Cuba by stationing nuclear missiles on it. Do you really think the USSR (and by extension the US in Western Europe) was acting in Cuba's best interests, or its own?

    America looks after America, nothing wrong with that, but please don't believe everything the US does is in some benign benevolent way for someone else's benefit. They calculate the benefit to themselves first.

    The point still stands: Germany was not handed back a "fixed up" country in 1945. It was a shocking place to live with hunger and mass homelessness. Germany brought it all on themselves of course, but to compare the suffering of a German child born in 1945 to a Greek child born in 2012 is a bad joke. It is also a bad joke to suggest that the Greeks would work their way out of their mess if they only got a little help "like those Germans".


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  • Closed Accounts Posts: 10,012 ✭✭✭✭thebman


    It isn't really a million miles from what we are taking and planning to do TBH.

    This was interesting I thought:
    http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/frontpage/2012/0406/1224314441366.html


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 5,797 ✭✭✭KyussBishop


    I read entries on Adam Curtis's blog when I can (people probably know his excellent documentaries; his blog is equally excellent), and am currently going through a backlog, as haven't read it in about half a year.

    There is a brilliant entry on Greece, which puts the current economic crisis in some historical context; watch the hour-long documentary at the end, am just part way into it, but it's very good:
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2011/11/the_ghost_of_the_colonels.html

    EDIT: Finished watching that documentary at the end of the article; it is a seriously good documentary, and the events toward the end (detailing the Athens Polytechnic uprising) are pretty shocking.


  • Banned (with Prison Access) Posts: 8,224 ✭✭✭Going Forward




  • Closed Accounts Posts: 930 ✭✭✭poeticseraphim


    The Austerity vrs Stimulus debate is a fake one...what is needed is reforms structered toward growth.

    However weak caretaker Govts in Greece Italy etc and weak Govt here too have not undertaken such measures.

    Any stimulus is evaporated in the instability.The markets react to the uncertainty of caretaker govts and social unrest as much as fears of bank runs euro collapse and defaults.

    Infact the markets have reacted severly to political unrest and elections. They need to reform and enforce corporate laws.

    I do think they(germany and France ) have been using collective action clauses and chanelling bailouts through sovereign debt as a way of trying to secure there own bondholders and relieve them of accountability. It might actually simply be cheaper for them to recapitalize their own banks.

    Eurobonds are not going to help as they would be destructive to the German economy and to be honest EU debt is still unsustainable no matter where it is.

    I wonder sometimes if the closer union is genuine or used as a bluff to get out of requests for Eurobonds. They all ask for things they know they know govts will never give in to so they can be seen to be trying to show leadership and union but cannot get blamed for the stalemate.

    It has to be said the current strategy has failed.

    Merkel may be right in saying there cannot be eurobonds and banking union without greater poloitical union (she is probably right) but it does get her of the hook as other leaders cannot give this. They all have their own electorate to answer to also. And Merkels first responsibilty is to her electorate and the same goes for Hollande etc. Monti being an unelected leader of Italy has less of a mandate to press her on issues. Which is a shame with him being an economist.

    They will all try to get a union that best suits them.(if that is what happens)..as that is their moral duty to their electotrates.

    The fact that EU citizens in some countries are prepared to let child malnutrition go on in other EU countries is disgusting to me.

    Putting money into insolvent banks is stupid and immoral. It wastes money and encourages people to keep their savings in unsafe banks. There is no reason why insolvent banks could not have been wound down in a structured way and certain banks supported. Perhaps worry over certain bondholders..but certainly contagion could have been prevented that way. No scenario is a nightmare if it is managed well.

    There was no need for it to it to be such a disaster.

    Putting banks on welfare is not capitalism it is protectionism it is corporate facism.

    To protect the banking sector it should have been audited legally (instead of Irish accountants hiding stuff) and partially bailed out. The rest wound down gradually. And slowly along with growth stimulating reforms and a strengthening of banking and corporate law to help market confidence and public confidence.

    It has been totally mismanaged.


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 12,455 ✭✭✭✭Monty Burnz


    very little quality of life for generations...more like.

    there are reported cases of child malnutritions in Athens and other cities, while

    Greece is said to top the global list of per capita ownership of Porsche Cayennes
    This is the type of system the Greeks voted for. They sowed the wind.


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  • Closed Accounts Posts: 12,455 ✭✭✭✭Monty Burnz


    It's inhumane in Greece when they can't afford all the luxuries of 21st century society - but it's ok in South America, Africa, Asia? :confused:

    There's a massive double standard at work here. The Greeks lived off credit for a decade or more and are now discovering that they have to repay (some of) it. Perhaps you feel they are too stupid to govern themselves?


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 930 ✭✭✭poeticseraphim


    It's inhumane in Greece when they can't afford all the luxuries of 21st century society - but it's ok in South America, Africa, Asia? :confused:

    There's a massive double standard at work here. The Greeks lived off credit for a decade or more and are now discovering that they have to repay (some of) it. Perhaps you feel they are too stupid to govern themselves?

    IT IS WRONG EVERYWHERE...but just because we can't do everything everywhere does not mean we should do nothing here now...

    And we should help everywhere ...where we can

    CANCEL ALL DEBT!


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 12,455 ✭✭✭✭Monty Burnz


    IT IS WRONG EVERYWHERE...but just because we can't do everything everywhere does not mean we should do nothing here now...

    And we should help everywhere ...where we can
    There's nothing stopping you giving away your money, is there?
    CANCEL ALL DEBT!
    You realise that one man's debt is another man's savings? CANCEL ALL SAVINGS AND PENSIONS!


  • Registered Users Posts: 5,155 ✭✭✭PopeBuckfastXVI


    CANCEL ALL DEBT!

    If debt, and by extension, lending were cancelled tomorrow, Greece, not to mention Ireland would be absolutely and completely f*cked.

    Austerity? You ain't seen nothing yet.


  • Banned (with Prison Access) Posts: 8,224 ✭✭✭Going Forward


    It's inhumane in Greece when they can't afford all the luxuries of 21st century society - but it's ok in South America, Africa, Asia? :confused:

    There's a massive double standard at work here. The Greeks lived off credit for a decade or more and are now discovering that they have to repay (some of) it. Perhaps you feel they are too stupid to govern themselves?

    Why muddy the water talking about other countries?
    You do realise that you're responding to a thread in the European Union forum?

    Do you really believe that life is so black and white that any and all austerity measures levelled against a country's people can be justified to get figures on a balance sheet to look acceptable?

    The WORLD, not just Greece has lived off credit for the past decade- there is a global crisis that you may not have noticed.

    The lack of sympathy or interest shown to to the Greeks here is highly unnerving.

    PS: Look up the definition of a sociopath and you might get a shock.


  • Banned (with Prison Access) Posts: 8,224 ✭✭✭Going Forward


    There's nothing stopping you giving away your money, is there?

    You realise that one man's debt is another man's savings? CANCEL ALL SAVINGS AND PENSIONS!

    And, the value of your investments may fall as well as rise.

    If the bankers had adhered to their old safer traditional lending criteria instead of shovelling money out of their doors to whoever could put an X on the dotted line, the world would not be in such a financial mess now.

    Some sort of debt cancellation is required; it will make little difference to lending as that's all but dried up anyway.


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 12,455 ✭✭✭✭Monty Burnz


    Why muddy the water talking about other countries?
    You do realise that you're responding to a thread in the European Union forum?
    So providing any sort of context is 'muddying the waters'? :confused:
    Do you really believe that life is so black and white that any and all austerity measures levelled against a country's people can be justified to get figures on a balance sheet to look acceptable?
    You are living in a world of fiction. Greece has no money. This is why it cannot pay for stuff - they have imposed austerity on themselves. And of course they have already spent around a hundred billion euros of borrowed money that they will never pay back - money that came out of the pockets of pension funds and other institutional investors. They have had a whale of a party, now let them clean up.
    The WORLD, not just Greece has lived off credit for the past decade- there is a global crisis that you may not have noticed.
    And THE WORLD intends to pay back what it owes. But not Greece.
    The lack of sympathy or interest shown to to the Greeks here is highly unnerving.
    I have tremendous interest in the Greek story. I dare say I've been following it longer than you have. They have my sympathy, but they used their sovereignty to mismanage themselves into a disaster. You seem to feel there should be no consequences? Here's a suggestion - send a Greek charity all of your money. When you've done that, come back to the rest of us and you might have a shred of credibility.
    PS: Look up the definition of a sociopath and you might get a shock.
    You can look up 'ad hominem' while you are at it. It's usually collocated with 'losing argument'.


  • Registered Users Posts: 5,112 ✭✭✭Blowfish


    Do you really believe that life is so black and white that any and all austerity measures levelled against a country's people can be justified to get figures on a balance sheet to look acceptable?
    So you think they should be able to keep borrowing and not pay it back indefinitely?


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 12,455 ✭✭✭✭Monty Burnz


    Blowfish wrote: »
    So you think they should be able to keep borrowing and not pay it back indefinitely?
    So it would seem.


  • Banned (with Prison Access) Posts: 8,224 ✭✭✭Going Forward


    So providing any sort of context is 'muddying the waters'? :confused:

    You are living in a world of fiction. Greece has no money. This is why it cannot pay for stuff - they have imposed austerity on themselves. And of course they have already spent around a hundred billion euros of borrowed money that they will never pay back - money that came out of the pockets of pension funds and other institutional investors. They have had a whale of a party, now let them clean up.

    And THE WORLD intends to pay back what it owes. But not Greece.

    I have tremendous interest in the Greek story. I dare say I've been following it longer than you have. They have my sympathy, but they used their sovereignty to mismanage themselves into a disaster. You seem to feel there should be no consequences? Here's a suggestion - send a Greek charity all of your money. When you've done that, come back to the rest of us and you might have a shred of credibility.

    You can look up 'ad hominem' while you are at it. It's usually collocated with 'losing argument'.

    This is very simple.
    The WORLD has not got a hope in hell of paying back the debt it has racked up.

    What you term the "stuff" that Greece cannot pay for, essential medicine, food, electricity, let them live without, to punish and teach them a little lesson, is that right?

    This cruel socio political experiment is a futile effort to correct professionally mismanaged pension funds and investments.

    You may well have an interest in the Greek crisis, but its obviously purely academic.


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  • Closed Accounts Posts: 12,455 ✭✭✭✭Monty Burnz


    This is very simple.
    The WORLD has not got a hope in hell of paying back the debt it has racked up.
    You have some sort of analysis to back this up, I presume?
    What you term the "stuff" that Greece cannot pay for, essential medicine, food, electricity, let them live without, to punish and teach them a little lesson, is that right?
    It's not a case of them being punished though, is it? I can't afford a Ferrari - am I being punished? :confused: If they put themselves in a position where they can't afford things entirely through their own actions as a sovereign state, who exactly is punishing them?
    This cruel socio political experiment is a futile effort to correct professionally mismanaged pension funds and investments.
    This makes no sense I'm afraid - 'to correct professionally mismanaged pension funds'? :confused: What does that even mean?

    I think you are confusing economic gravity with some sort of ideological mission. If you can't afford it, you can't have it. That's how it has always worked. What makes you think it suddenly changed?
    You may well have an interest in the Greek crisis, but its obviously purely academic.
    How has your transfer of all your worldly wealth to Greek charities gone? You must have done it faster than I thought was possible, unless you are indulging in further hypocrisy?


  • Banned (with Prison Access) Posts: 8,224 ✭✭✭Going Forward


    You have some sort of analysis to back this up, I presume?

    It's not a case of them being punished though, is it? I can't afford a Ferrari - am I being punished? :confused: If they put themselves in a position where they can't afford things entirely through their own actions as a sovereign state, who exactly is punishing them?

    This makes no sense I'm afraid - 'to correct professionally mismanaged pension funds'? :confused: What does that even mean?

    I think you are confusing economic gravity with some sort of ideological mission. If you can't afford it, you can't have it. That's how it has always worked. What makes you think it suddenly changed?

    How has your transfer of all your worldly wealth to Greek charities gone? You must have done it faster than I thought was possible, unless you are indulging in further hypocrisy?

    Am I correct in reaching the conclusion that you believe that the Greeks, and presumably other financial incompetents such as beggars on the street are a waste of space due to their misfortune/foolishness?

    I would hope that some sort of basic standard of living for the average person (provision of essential healthcare, food, electricity) would be provided for, as a humanitarian condition of any loan agreement, austerity or no austerity.

    BTW, what hypocrisy of mine are you referring to?


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 12,455 ✭✭✭✭Monty Burnz


    Am I correct in reaching the conclusion that you believe that the Greeks, and presumably other financial incompetents such as beggars on the street are a waste of space due to their misfortune/foolishness?
    Would that help you to assemble a straw man of some sort?
    I would hope that some sort of basic standard of living for the average person (provision of essential healthcare, food, electricity) would be provided for, as a humanitarian condition of any loan agreement, austerity or no austerity.
    I certainly hope and expect that they can afford that once they start paying their taxes.
    BTW, what hypocrisy of mine are you referring to?
    That would be the hypocrisy of lecturing others about being indifferent to the problems of the Greek people without doing anything practical to relieve them. I'm sure there are plenty of charities you can donate to if you feel the need to lecture down to us from the high moral ground.


  • Banned (with Prison Access) Posts: 8,224 ✭✭✭Going Forward


    Would that help you to assemble a straw man of some sort?

    The question remains open for you to answer.
    I certainly hope and expect that they can afford that once they start paying their taxes.

    Respect for human rights and dignity is a core value of the EU. Basic social protection is required in Greece.
    That would be the hypocrisy of lecturing others about being indifferent to the problems of the Greek people without doing anything practical to relieve them. I'm sure there are plenty of charities you can donate to if you feel the need to lecture down to us from the high moral ground.


    There is nothing hypocritical about condemning cruel treatment.

    And I would remind you that you have no knowledge of anyone else's charitable actions.


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 12,455 ✭✭✭✭Monty Burnz


    The question remains open for you to answer.
    The Greeks are not a waste of space. I genuinely didn't think that needed answering...
    Respect for human rights and dignity is a core value of the EU. Basic social protection is required in Greece.
    Yes, basic social protection. Food, shelter. There's plenty of money in Greece to pay for food and shelter for all if they bothered to collect and pay their taxes.
    There is nothing hypocritical about condemning cruel treatment.

    And I would remind you that you have no knowledge of anyone else's charitable actions.
    It's a little hypocritical to come here and tell us how heartless we all are if you have done exactly zero more than anyone else to fix it.


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 930 ✭✭✭poeticseraphim


    You know we go on about the apathy of the banking industry and the lack of social responsibility that is apparrant yet this society espouses those values too. How has a Greek child or a child of any nation done anything to contribute. I am not trying to simplify the issue. However if your reaction to seeing a human being suffer is not only walk on but attack them further there is little hope for the species.


    It's like stealing trousers from a homeless person.

    The people suffering are more than likely single parents those from a poor socio economic class , these people did not benefit from the corruption within their society economically.

    If this is the attitude of the middle and ruling classes it is no wonder the working classes are becoming so radicalized. It can only lead to a generation of very angry children indoctrined by their parents to show the same stone faced lack of empathy to those they view as tyrannical less than human and in power over them. It is wealthy Greeks who evade tax and those who suffer now supported tax funded services for them to enjoy.


    It is interesting to hear Irish espouse the value of paying taxes considering some of the scandals here with Mr Wallace and his kind. We cannot seem to collect our own taxes.

    This is a virtueless society and a society without altruism cannot survive.

    By the way if anyone has a link to some Greek NGO's that deal with children or welfare etc please do post them or pm me them if it is not allowed i have been trying to find some.

    I would find a wider debate on charity interesting ...i was looking at a list of countries detailing those who give least and most to charity in the world.

    https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/lv?key=0AonYZs4MzlZbdHEtRUY3dllDZEI4RnFtR1A1NmpZUmc&hl=en&rm=full#gid=0

    Germany was one of the least generous. Malta i think was the most generous Ireland was also amongst the most generous.


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 12,455 ✭✭✭✭Monty Burnz


    You know we go on about the apathy of the banking industry and the lack of social responsibility that is apparrant yet this society espouses those values too. How has a Greek child or a child of any nation done anything to contribute. I am not trying to simplify the issue. However if your reaction to seeing a human being suffer is not only walk on but attack them further there is little hope for the species.


    It's like stealing trousers from a homeless person.

    The people suffering are more than likely single parents those from a poor socio economic class , these people did not benefit from the corruption within their society economically.

    If this is the attitude of the middle and ruling classes it is no wonder the working classes are becoming so radicalized. It can only lead to a generation of very angry children indoctrined by their parents to show the same stone faced lack of empathy to those they view as tyrannical less than human and in power over them. It is wealthy Greeks who evade tax and those who suffer now supported tax funded services for them to enjoy.


    It is interesting to hear Irish espouse the value of paying taxes considering some of the scandals here with Mr Wallace and his kind. We cannot seem to collect our own taxes.

    This is a virtueless society and a society without altruism cannot survive.

    By the way if anyone has a link to some Greek NGO's that deal with children or welfare etc please do post them or pm me them if it is not allowed i have been trying to find some.
    Once more, just one more time, I'll post the Vanity Fair article written about Greece a couple of years ago. It's long, but it's a great read and it might give you some decent insights before you try to cast this as some sort of class war nonsense.
    That was the good news. The long-term picture was far bleaker. In addition to its roughly $400 billion (and growing) of outstanding government debt, the Greek number crunchers had just figured out that their government owed another $800 billion or more in pensions. Add it all up and you got about $1.2 trillion, or more than a quarter-million dollars for every working Greek. Against $1.2 trillion in debts, a $145 billion bailout was clearly more of a gesture than a solution. And those were just the official numbers; the truth is surely worse. “Our people went in and couldn’t believe what they found,” a senior I.M.F. official told me, not long after he’d returned from the I.M.F.’s first Greek mission. “The way they were keeping track of their finances—they knew how much they had agreed to spend, but no one was keeping track of what he had actually spent. It wasn’t even what you would call an emerging economy. It was a Third World country.”

    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.

    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.

    Oddly enough, the financiers in Greece remain more or less beyond reproach. They never ceased to be anything but sleepy old commercial bankers. Virtually alone among Europe’s bankers, they did not buy U.S. subprime-backed bonds, or leverage themselves to the hilt, or pay themselves huge sums of money. The biggest problem the banks had was that they had lent roughly 30 billion euros to the Greek government—where it was stolen or squandered. In Greece the banks didn’t sink the country. The country sank the banks.

    ...and it continues...


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 930 ✭✭✭poeticseraphim


    Once more, just one more time, I'll post the Vanity Fair article written about Greece a couple of years ago. It's long, but it's a great read and it might give you some decent insights before you try to cast this as some sort of class war nonsense.



    ...and it continues...

    Again how is a five year old Greek child fainting in school from malnutrition to be blamed for the behavouir of the society they had the misfortune to be born into?
    http://www.ansamed.info/ansamed/en/news/sections/generalnews/2012/04/06/visualizza_new.html_162356544.html
    http://www.keeptalkinggreece.com/2012/06/15/crete-child-faints-due-to-malnutrition-mother-steals-milk-for-her-children/
    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2085163/Children-dumped-streets-Greek-parents-afford-them.html
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/2012/mar/13/greece-breadline-hungry-children-pe
    http://greece.greekreporter.com/tag/sos-eliza/


    Seriously are you that angry with them ? Well enjoying revenge then?? What is wrong with you?

    Here is a charity trying to help that i donate to... and there take
    http://www.soschildrensvillages.org.uk/charity-news/archive/2012/01/greek-crisis-forces-families-to-abandon-children
    And incase anyone wants to help...


  • Posts: 0 [Deleted User]




    Didn't we have someone collapse due to malnutrition in a school in Cork?

    I've yet to see how austerity is the cause of anyone starving. If train drivers can earn 60k pa. in Greece, then perhaps the severe poverty is caused by economic mismanagement and corrupting governmental and non-governmental interference, rather than a lack of resources available to the state itself during this period of 'austerity'.


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  • Closed Accounts Posts: 12,455 ✭✭✭✭Monty Burnz


    Why does a 5 year old child fainting in Greece command more of your attention than thousands of 5 year olds dropping dead in Africa, South America and Asia?

    And why do you get so much pleasure out of it? Does if make you feel good, give you a thrill or something, when they die? What kind of person are you that could take pleasure from their deaths??


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