Time to copy 1953 German Debt Write-Off?

SpaceTime

Well that's the thing, would we be prepared to take a hit of close on maybe half a billion (that we know about as Irish banks and pension funds could easily own quite a chunk of bonds too).

It will have to be written off as they just can't pay it but I'm just saying the money isn't exclusively flowing from Berlin. We're all in this mess.

View

porsche959 wrote: »

Germany has had debt written off many times. Its record is poor contrary to what the neo-liberal ECB apologists will tell you.

Maybe you"ll enlighten us as to how much debt Germany has had written off in, let's say, the last 50 years?

porsche959

View wrote: »

Maybe you"ll enlighten us as to how much debt Germany has had written off in, let's say, the last 50 years?

Haven't the foggiest but some of its own banks failed as recently as 2008. IIRC they tried to blame the Paddys.

tayto lover

porsche959 wrote: »

Haven't the foggiest but some of its own banks failed as recently as 2008. IIRC they tried to blame the Paddys.

AND got away with it.

View

porsche959 wrote: »

Haven't the foggiest

That's zero then...

porsche959 wrote: »

but some of its own banks failed as recently as 2008. IIRC they tried to blame the Paddys.

An Irish IFSC bank, which had just been taken over by a German one, DID drag down one (maybe even two) of their banks in 2008. Understandably they weren't impressed particularly since we got the corporation tax, PAYE etc from that bank when times were good and they got the bill for it when times were bad.

DeJa VooDoo

View wrote: »

That's zero then...

Zero?

https://www.google.ie/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=8&ved=0CE4QFjAH&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.independent.ie%2Fbusiness%2Fdamien-kiberd-on-greece-germans-are-world-class-debt-defaulters-and-soccer-players-30937381.html&ei=FafGVN-_F8n4UPKdhJAC&usg=AFQjCNH77QWRs4xBEhLAIlD_aEAEnvIwWg&sig2=ZHhkwH9dlC1iCz6f5EjyOQ


The reward for two world wars more like...

Piliger

DeJa VooDoo wrote: »

Zero?

https://www.google.ie/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=8&ved=0CE4QFjAH&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.independent.ie%2Fbusiness%2Fdamien-kiberd-on-greece-germans-are-world-class-debt-defaulters-and-soccer-players-30937381.html&ei=FafGVN-_F8n4UPKdhJAC&usg=AFQjCNH77QWRs4xBEhLAIlD_aEAEnvIwWg&sig2=ZHhkwH9dlC1iCz6f5EjyOQ


The reward for two world wars more like...

Just another piece of nonsense from Damien Kiberd. evidence of nothing but his own idiotic ideas.

DeJa VooDoo

Piliger wrote: »

Just another piece of nonsense from Damien Kiberd. evidence of nothing but his own idiotic ideas.

Go Germany had no debts written off after both world wars?
Are you seriously suggesting this?

DeJa VooDoo

Maybe it's the messenger you guys like to shoot.

Here's another article, from the Irish Times this time...

https://www.google.ie/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=12&ved=0CG4QFjAL&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.irishtimes.com%2Fopinion%2Fwhy-ireland-should-support-greek-plan-to-write-down-euro-zone-public-debt-1.2060653&ei=FafGVN-_F8n4UPKdhJAC&usg=AFQjCNFwZwjdZzIcisumJ_qrpGr-wZ0lKw&sig2=VnZsJffcw8to05rnQQ-jjg

DeJa VooDoo

Here's The Guardian's take on it.....


https://www.google.ie/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=12&ved=0CDgQFjABOAo&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fworld%2F2015%2Fjan%2F18%2Fshould-greece-debt-forgiven-new-idea-europe-syriza&ei=hqvGVJz6OIn2Uq6xgOAO&usg=AFQjCNFiJjhSiDV4sxakh864-aiL7LHTPg&sig2=RO8GcFfOgRMQ3bghD6Tv6w

Saipanne

golfwallah wrote: »

There an interesting article in last Saturday’s Irish Times about the International agreements reached following the 1953 London Conference, amongst other things, to write off more than 50% of Germany’s post war debt, in the interest of peace and prosperity in Europe:


Fear of the rise of extremist political parties is now prompting Greeks proposals for a “European Debt Conference” and similar plan for today’s national debts of EU states.

The IT article points to how this agreement was a success and, although Greece’s debt as a proportion of GDP is higher than was Germany’s in 1953, there is good cause to believe that a similar approach would also work today. Many we should support this Greek plan?

War reparations.

porsche959

View wrote: »

That's zero then...

An Irish IFSC bank, which had just been taken over by a German one, DID drag down one (maybe even two) of their banks in 2008. Understandably they weren't impressed particularly since we got the corporation tax, PAYE etc from that bank when times were good and they got the bill for it when times were bad.

Aw, diddums. Guess that's the price you pay when you want control over ECB interest rate setting and set them at a level that is appropriate for your own economy but sets off unsustainable bubbles in others.

Piliger

DeJa VooDoo wrote: »

Go Germany had no debts written off after both world wars?
Are you seriously suggesting this?

Where did I suggest that ? Are you seriously saying I suggested this ?

Piliger

DeJa VooDoo wrote: »

Maybe it's the messenger you guys like to shoot.

Here's another article, from the Irish Times this time...

https://www.google.ie/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=12&ved=0CG4QFjAL&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.irishtimes.com%2Fopinion%2Fwhy-ireland-should-support-greek-plan-to-write-down-euro-zone-public-debt-1.2060653&ei=FafGVN-_F8n4UPKdhJAC&usg=AFQjCNFwZwjdZzIcisumJ_qrpGr-wZ0lKw&sig2=VnZsJffcw8to05rnQQ-jjg

DeJa VooDoo wrote: »

Here's The Guardian's take on it.....


https://www.google.ie/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=12&ved=0CDgQFjABOAo&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fworld%2F2015%2Fjan%2F18%2Fshould-greece-debt-forgiven-new-idea-europe-syriza&ei=hqvGVJz6OIn2Uq6xgOAO&usg=AFQjCNFiJjhSiDV4sxakh864-aiL7LHTPg&sig2=RO8GcFfOgRMQ3bghD6Tv6w

Two idiotic left wing pieces of nonsense. Greece needs to take responsibility and pay it's debts.

View

DeJa VooDoo wrote: »

Zero?

https://www.google.ie/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=8&ved=0CE4QFjAH&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.independent.ie%2Fbusiness%2Fdamien-kiberd-on-greece-germans-are-world-class-debt-defaulters-and-soccer-players-30937381.html&ei=FafGVN-_F8n4UPKdhJAC&usg=AFQjCNH77QWRs4xBEhLAIlD_aEAEnvIwWg&sig2=ZHhkwH9dlC1iCz6f5EjyOQ


The reward for two world wars more like...

I specified the last 50 years.

Do try again...

View

porsche959 wrote: »

Aw, diddums. Guess that's the price you pay when you want control over ECB interest rate setting and set them at a level that is appropriate for your own economy but sets off unsustainable bubbles in others.

Each member of the ECB has a vote when setting the interest rate, Germany (the Bundesbank to be specific) can't outvote the other member states no matter how much it tries....

Piliger

View wrote: »

Each member of the ECB has a vote when setting the interest rate, Germany (the Bundesbank to be specific) can't outvote the other member states no matter how much it tries....

This is the bigotry that lies at the heart of the anti German nonsense when it comes to spending cuts and the appalling overspending in Greece and elsewhere. Germany does not control the EU or Eurozone. All of the other countries make the decision and in fact the smaller countries are more powerful in that regard than ever before, but Germany takes on the weight of being the lead entity to take all the flak and the media exploits this, and dragging up the wars, to the nth degree to sell it's papers and advertising.

DeJa VooDoo

Piliger wrote: »

This is the bigotry that lies at the heart of the anti German nonsense when it comes to spending cuts and the appalling overspending in Greece and elsewhere. Germany does not control the EU or Eurozone. All of the other countries make the decision and in fact the smaller countries are more powerful in that regard than ever before, but Germany takes on the weight of being the lead entity to take all the flak and the media exploits this, and dragging up the wars, to the nth degree to sell it's papers and advertising.

With the day that's in it, it's timely and good to remember Germany's dodgy past.
Merkel thinks she has what the democratically elected leader of that time couldn't get.

FreudianSlippers

Bambi wrote: »

You're not allowed to draw comparisons between germanys debt write off and the current situation. You ask "Why not"? "Shut up that's why" is the answer.

According to our resident neo liberals anyway

Germany didn't really have its debt "written-off" though did it? Considering it made repayments well into the late 80s, I'd say that's hardly a write-off

FreudianSlippers

shedweller wrote: »

We were, until northern rock happened. Then the bondholders lost a lot but we paid them back. Or did that not happen?

So your argument is to go back to being reckless?

antoobrien

DeJa VooDoo wrote: »

Zero?

https://www.google.ie/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=8&ved=0CE4QFjAH&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.independent.ie%2Fbusiness%2Fdamien-kiberd-on-greece-germans-are-world-class-debt-defaulters-and-soccer-players-30937381.html&ei=FafGVN-_F8n4UPKdhJAC&usg=AFQjCNH77QWRs4xBEhLAIlD_aEAEnvIwWg&sig2=ZHhkwH9dlC1iCz6f5EjyOQ


The reward for two world wars more like...

Or perhaps enlightened self interest on behalf of the by the rest of the world by a recognising that the second war would probably not have happened without the Treaty of Versailles which created the huge burden of debt on the Weimar Republic that eventually saw it collapse into the Third Reich.

golfwallah

In Europe at the moment the impacts of years of austerity, stagnant economic growth / deflation, unemployment, are now being felt politically through the growing rise of extreme parties of the left and right. There has been insufficient stimulus through government / EU spending on wealth creating major capital projects to get economies moving again and economic opinion is divided as to whether the recent phase of Euro QE will really help the greater mass of people or merely concentrate yet more wealth into the hands of the super rich.

When the ordinary EU citizen reflects, even for a moment, on the current and developing political economic situation in the EU and Eurozone, he/she might think: “what exactly is going wrong – there must be a better way – and how do we stack up against a more successful / sustainable unions of states?

The most obvious example of who to compare with is the United States. The US didn’t arrive at monetary and fiscal union overnight – it took a couple of hundred years, many economic calamities and a civil war to get to where they are now. Europe is only a very short time into the Euro project – monetary union in name but only a common currency area in reality and also has many other inter-state differences, as with languages, culture, aging population, labour mobility, etc.

These issues and many more are considered in this article “9 Ways the Eurozone is More Fragile than the US”, from which the following are examples:

7) The Eurozone isn't a Fiscal Union
One of the key challenges to the Eurozone is a lack of fiscal union. A fiscal union is something Americans take for granted and rarely think about. In the US, when there is a shock to the output of one of our fifty states, fiscal transfers from the rest of the union help to cushion the blow. As an example, let's say there is a negative shock to the economy of Texas, perhaps due to a fall in oil prices. Economic output in Texas would fall. But for every dollar in lost output, the fall in income in Texas isn't a dollar but only about 60-65 cents.
Because when there are bad times in Texas the federal government transfers economic assistance there — on the premise that when there are bad times somewhere else, booming oil prices in Texas might help out another state in the union. It's a kind of risk pooling and insurance. In the scenario we've been discussing, Texans who were laid off from their jobs would be eligible for unemployment benefits. Those same unemployed Texans might also be eligible for federal welfare benefits. Also, when the earnings of Texans decrease due to bad economic times they would automatically pay less federal income tax. Conversely, when Texans are doing well, their federal taxes automatically rise. This serves as a kind of automatic stabilizer for the economy. Finally, the federal government can decide to cushion an economic shock to Texas by spending more money on Texan infrastructure or by funding federal projects at, say, the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
In the U.S. those shock absorbers at the federal level are considerable, since the federal government accounts for 25% to 30% of our GDP. In Europe, where the EU government only accounts for 1% of GDP, there simply isn't capacity for it to lend substantive assistance when countries are in trouble. So what winds up happening in the Eurozone is that when you have a $1 shock to the GDP of one country, that country's income goes down, effectively, by $1.
.......
8) Banking Union: The Eurozone's Stumbling Block

In the United States, we take for granted that every state in the union has banks that are insured by the FDIC. In Europe, however, German deposit insurance pays only for German banks, and Italian deposit insurance pays only for Italian banks.
In the U.S., on the other hand, when a bank goes bankrupt in California, we use the same pool of money to fix the problem as we would for a bank that goes bust in New York. Furthermore, in the United States, we have a banking system where the Federal Reserve, at the central level, not at the state level, decides which banks are in trouble and need assistance, or in the worst case, require resolution.
A banking union, in fact, is an important kind of risk sharing — a kind of subset of a fiscal union.
What concerns the Germans about a fiscal union — or, for that matter, a banking union — is that it pledges German citizens to support peripheral Eurozone economies and banks that are at risk of outright collapse. The fear in Germany is that risk-sharing will become risk-shifting — and that a fiscal union will become a transfer union.
In short, Germany, and other core Eurozone nations like The Netherlands, don't want to get stuck in a transfer union where they might be forced to subsidize Portugal and Italy and Greece and Spain forever. Fiscal unions and banking unions only work when shocks occur randomly.

9) Political Union — And Democratic Legitimacy in the Eurozone
In the case of the Eurozone, decisions that were once made at the national level get made at the supranational level. What was once decided by national legislatures of countries gets decided at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, while the executive powers of the EU are in Brussels within the European Commission. Decisions that were formerly handed down by national supreme courts get judged at The European Court of Justice in Luxembourg. And monetary policy that was executed by national central banks gets made by the ECB in Frankfurt, Germany.
What impact does this have on the political legitimacy of democracies?
If you are transferring national sovereignty from the nation state toward super-national authority, then you need a political union where those decisions being made at the super-national level are done in a democratic way. Otherwise, there are great challenges: For example the EU tells you that your country's budget is not acceptable and needs to be cut, or the ECB informs you that several of your national banks need to be shut down.
Decisions on budgets and bank supervision have already moved away from national capitals to the central authority — but the risk sharing component of fiscal and economic union never arrived. You might say that countries like Greece have lost their sovereignty on supervision and regulation without truly receiving the benefits of solidarity, i.e. risk-sharing.
Bureaucrats that were never elected by Greek citizens have begun making decisions that most Greeks would prefer to be made democratically in Athens, and many have already begun to blame their woes on the EU and the ECB and the Eurozone.
The issue, of course, brings us back to where we began our list: The rise of extremist political parties within the Eurozone.

Of course, identifying problems and issues is one thing – how best to resolve them is quite another. And therein lies the challenge for our politicians, or indeed ourselves, who elect them and expect them to move a bit more quickly towards resolving them!

Piliger

DeJa VooDoo wrote: »

With the day that's in it, it's timely and good to remember Germany's dodgy past.
Merkel thinks she has what the democratically elected leader of that time couldn't get.

What utter nonsense.

golfwallah

FreudianSlippers wrote: »

Germany didn't really have its debt "written-off" though did it? Considering it made repayments well into the late 80s, I'd say that's hardly a write-off

According to Wikipedia, by the time of the London Debt Conference:

Germany had 16 billion marks of debts from the 1920s which had defaulted in the 1930s, but which Germany decided to repay to restore its reputation. This money was owed to government and private banks in the U.S., France and Britain. Another 16 billion marks represented post war loans by the U.S. Under the London Debts Agreement of 1953, the repayable amount was reduced by 50% to about 15 billion marks and stretched out over 30 years, and compared to the fast-growing German economy were of minor impact.

DeJa VooDoo

Piliger wrote: »

What utter nonsense.

Least we forget!

Auschwitz-Birkenau.

:mad:

Piliger

DeJa VooDoo wrote: »

Least we forget!

Auschwitz-Birkenau.

:mad:

And yet now in Greece the Greeks are trying to whip up those old hatreds and enmities that lead to those ghastly atrocities. And they are doing it for no other reason but to avoid paying what they owe. How shameful.
The whole European Union project was embarked on and has been a phenomenal success in abandoning the old racist enmities and hate that caused two world wars.
Along the way Greece was brought on board despite not deserving it or earning it. It then squandered the wealth poured into it by Europe, and in the last couple of years it sucked up 200+billion !
The rest of Europe will not thank or respect Greece for now trying to exploit it's victim history to try to dig up these old hatred and prejudice for no other reason that to avoid paying it's debts. It is a shameful and pathetic path that Greece is embarking on if it thinks this is the way forward.
Pay your debts Greece !

golfwallah

DeJa VooDoo wrote: »

Least we forget!

Auschwitz-Birkenau.

:mad:

I don't think anyone is advocating that we forget about the past and not learn some lessons from it.

That said, the focus and objectives of the Marshall Plan in 1948 and the London Debt Agreement of 1953 were the future and re-building Europe along open democratic lines. It was not to seek retribution for the past!

These positive actions did help to achieve those aims and objectives.

It's now time to take stock and figure out how best to move from where we are (massive public debt, recession, deflation, unemployment, etc.) to a situation where people can afford to raise their families, house themselves and have a reasonable lifestyle in return for hard work and business endeavour. History shows that a well functioning middle class is essential for economic growth.

Not an easy one to solve. Germany, being the strongest economically has to play a key role, but Angela Merkel's approach of letting things happen and responding to crises in a minimalist way isn't providing the answers.

Where is the leadership and vision, as demonstrated by the Marshall Plan and the London Debt Conference, going to come from to move Europe out of its current economic malaise?

View

DeJa VooDoo wrote: »

Least we forget!

Auschwitz-Birkenau.

:mad:

It is an insult to the memory of those who died there to use them as a political football to try and score cheap points on this board.

DeJa VooDoo

View wrote: »

It is an insult to the memory of those who died there to use them as a political football to try and score cheap points on this board.

In your opinion.

Your hero merkel is driving the austerity agenda, what is it with Germans trying to have ultimate control?
The final solution is it?

golfwallah

Depositors are pulling out billions from Greek Banks since the election results and Greek banks have lost 1/4 of their value in two days - see Telegraph article.