Europe is turning in to a little shop of economic horrors with Greece playing the role of the Venus flytrap plant monster.
Posted on 03/10/2015 8:42:13 AM PDT by tcrlaf
Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis has described his country as the most bankrupt in the world and said European leaders knew all along that Athens would never repay its debts, in blunt comments that sparked a backlash in the German media on Tuesday.
A documentary about the Greek debt crisis on German public broadcaster ARD was aired on the same day euro zone finance ministers met in Brussels to discuss whether to provide Athens with further funding in exchange for delivering reforms.
"Clever people in Brussels, in Frankfurt and in Berlin knew back in May 2010 that Greece would never pay back its debts. But they acted as if Greece wasn't bankrupt, as if it just didn't have enough liquid funds," Varoufakis told the documentary.
(Excerpt) Read more at uk.reuters.com ...
For the first time in public, though practically the entire world assumed it, an official from The IMF has admitted that the various Greek bailouts were not for The Greeks at all... "They gave money to save German and French banks, not Greece,” Paolo Batista, one of the Executive Directors of International Monetary Fund told Greek private Alpha TV on Tuesday. http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/03/10/us-eurozone-greece-varoufakis-idUKKBN0M60MN20150310
Kick the Greeks out of the EU and leave them to their well earned life of abject poverty.
What fool ever believed that Greece would repay its debts? If the Germans honestly believed this, they are idiots. That’s not to say that the Greeks are right in taking money and not repaying it, but the whole lot of them deserve what they are getting.
Why validate the EU at all? It isn’t the fault of the Greek people that their politicians signed up for this social-market empire.
Same one buying US 30 year Treasury bonds?
The Greeks need to get Bono on board to campaign for their debts to be forgiven.
The Germans, meaning the people or the politicians?
Remember that the terms of the loans, whether paid or unpaid, were that the countries that took them had to give up their financial sovereignty to the EU for all time.
I am Shocked. SHOCKED! I tell you, to learn that socialist parasites won't repay debts.
Everybody is in favor of slavery, just so long as the "slave" is someone else.
No matter what, by taking those loans, Greece gave up its sovereign right to an independent financial policy. Whether they pay them back or not. Ireland claims to have paid theirs back, but they can no longer conduct a domestic sovereign financial policy ever.
Why did the Europeons want Greece in the EU in the first place?
All about territory. Like Jose Manuel Barroso said in 2007, they are an empire, and empires gobble up territory. Shows that they really are hawkish about entities like Russia too; the 1990s annexation of the Balkan states (with Clinton’s foolish help) was a land grab and a challenge to Russia.
This is a curious question.
I think it became a topic of who wants to play at the poker table, and the rules committee eventually agreed to a couple of basic rules. Business-wise....shifting to one standard currency was BIG deal in the 1990s when the topic got brought up.
Based out of Germany at the time....it was a major hassle whenever I traveled around to France, Italy or Netherlands...because of the currency requirements. Every local bank charged to get money, and you always had money left at the end....so the banks charged you to take the left-over currency back. It was hard to find anyone who was against the one-currency idea.
What Greece found though....they had significant debts already in the 1980s....operating with massive bank loans to carry them through each year....and situated with a large population who refused to report actual income or pay assigned taxes, and a large bulky government that had costs written all over it.
It would have made better sense to limit the Euro to strictly Germany, France, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Belgium and Austria. But that’s not the way it unfolded.
Did you mean the Baltic states? Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia? All those former appendages to the Soviet Empire were and are predominantly non-Slavic and the wooing to become part of the EU and under the brim of NATO’s umbrella was very mutual. Around a thousand miles of twisting cold but ice free coastline access to the North Sea is something Russia wants back and which is in our interest they don’t get back.
Bitter pill time. Well, Spiro,unless someone else picks up the tab, you can't. That's because your country has no resources to speak of, no oil, no coal, no iron, and seems to be populated 100% by fascinating and very bright non-team players who for all their intelligence and undoubted charm, are incapable of running anything other than small eccentric family businesses which make little money, and who are not happy unless the other guy in any deal, dies. They make nothing but conversation.
There are few good roads. Not a lot of railroads. The corrupt "government" is run on Turkish lines ca 1790 and employs 1/3 of the national work force, who very often do not bother to show up to accept the expected bribes for stamping government forms needed by other Greeks for permission to use the substandard restrooms or get on the bus, which may not show up either. The last straw are the HUGE numbers of illegal immigrants who soak up any work for starvation wages and who consume far more than they produce. Definitely time to cut those folks loose. Use those C-130s the Americans bought you to fly'em back home.
Time for Greece to press the reset button. Everybody go back to the 2-acre family farm on some rocky hillside and start again. Olives, wheat, cheese, wine bartered to the neighbors. Or invite them to the US, where the only level-headed Greeks can be found, to help them get the right 'tude and what's left of the Protestant Ethic.
Meantime, the Greeks can cut up the credit cards, and the Krauts can restructure the debt and take 200 years of E-Z payments.
Stay tuned, next week we'll solve Portugal's problems. Italy and Spain can fend for themselves
Every German! EVERY ONE!
Clinton didn’t go into those states militarily in the 90s that I recall. He did sign a partnership charter with the Baltic states back in 1998 with an implied offer for them to eventually join NATO.
It’s not in the USA’s interest that the EU dominates any of the regions you mentioned either.
Thanks, I see you did mean the Balkans. I personally agree that Clinton’s anti-Serb (Slavic and Orthodox cousins of the Russians) adventures gained us no friends and created some enemies. One more example of Democrat foreign policy in action.
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