Germany's top institutes push 'Grexit' plans as showdown escalates

UK Telegraph ^ | January 27, 2015 | Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

[C19fan]

A top German body has called for a clear mechanism to force Greece out of the euro if the left-wing Syriza government repudiates the terms of the country’s €245bn rescue. “Financial support must be cut off if Greece does not comply with its reform commitments,” said the Institute of German Economic Research (IW). "If Greece is going to take a tough line, then Europe will take a tough line as well." IW is the second German institute in two days to issue a blunt warning to the new Greek premier, Alexis Tsipras, who has vowed to halt debt payments and reverse austerity measures imposed by the EU-IMF Troika.

[C19fan]

So far Germany's response to Syriza's playing a game of political-economy chicken is, "Go Ahead Make My Day". I bet Germany would be relieved if those troublesome Greeks were kicked out. One reason for Germany's at least so far hard line is the original bailout shifted most the Greek debt away from banks into governmental bodies like the IMF and EU. So Greece reneging on its debt would not result in any sort of banking crisis.

[Buckeye McFrog]

The Greeks getting kicked out is not the problem.
The fact that Italy or Spain might follow suit is the problem.

[Savage Beast]

Maybe the Germans could take the Greek antiquities—the Parthenon, the contents of the National Museum—that sort of thing—as partial payment and give Greece a few more months.

[struggle]

>>Maybe the Germans could take the Greek antiquities—the Parthenon, the contents of the National Museum—that sort of thing—as partial payment and give Greece a few more months.

Take the Cyclades and put up resorts for German tourists.

[Noumenon]

They do have some lovely islands.

“The twenty-first century will be a century of iron and storms. It will not resemble those harmonious futures predicted up to the 1970s. It will not be the global village prophesied by Marshall MacLuhan in 1966, or Bill Gates’ planetary network, or Francis Fukuyama’s end of history: a liberal global civilization directed by a universal state. It will be a century of competing peoples and ethnic identities. And paradoxically, the victorious peoples will be those that remain faithful to, or return to, ancestral values and realities – which are biological, cultural, ethical, social, and spiritual – and that at the same time will master techno-science. The twenty-first century will be the one in which European civilization, Promethean and tragic but eminently fragile, will undergo a metamorphosis or enter its irremediable twilight.”
Guillaume Faye as stated in his book Archeofuturism: European Visions of the Post-Catastrophic Age

Blood and storms, indeed. And not just in Europe.

[SunkenCiv]

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