Posted on 06/25/2015 5:24:18 AM PDT by Kaslin
For almost six years Greece has been on the cusp of financial disaster. Its Northern European and international creditors have extended loans, suspended interest payments and forgiven some debt.
But European lenders have also stubbornly kept to the old-fashioned principle that debtors freely borrowed their money from lenders, and therefore most borrowed money must be paid back, regardless of the current financial status of the debtors.
Greece counters that after all sorts of austerity budgets, it simply can no longer inflict the necessary pain on its relatively tiny population to squeeze out enough cash to pay its well-off creditors. In other words, borrowed money only sometimes must be paid back -- depending on the relative wealth of the respective borrower and lender.
Economists still bicker over what caused the crisis. Was it Greek structural inefficiencies coupled with appetites for expensive foreign imports that Greeks could not afford? In the last decade, high-priced Mercedes cars became as common in Athens as the swimming pools that dotted the Aegean landscape
(Excerpt) Read more at townhall.com ...
Collective insanity
Ping
They won’t pay for the same reason WE won’t pay.....they can’t.
In one Greek town the per capita ownership of Porsche was so high that they won some kind of honorary award from Porsche and representative came out for a meet and greet with the Mayor.
Yeah. Nobody is innocent there. The Greeks cooked the books to get into the EU, and the rest of them just ignored that.
This was a forgone conclusion.
Exactly. The first corollary to Murphy’s law is that what can’t happen, won’t.
Who was it said, “If you owe the bank a million dollars and can’t pay you have a problem. If you owe the bank a billion dollars and can’t pay, the bank has the problem.”
In other words, borrowed money only sometimes must be paid back — depending on the relative wealth of the respective borrower and lender.
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Sad to say but I have in-laws that think that way. I’ve learned the hard way, not to “loan” money to certain people, they will eventually consider it a gift.
Borrow 100,000 Euros, the bank owns you. Borrow 100,000,000 Euros, you own the bank. Gee, what happens if Greece doesn’t pay? Are they gonna repossess Greece?
The problem that Greece has or had, didn’t just happen. This was 40 years in the making. For that length of time, Greece voters kept voting for these LIBERALS, SOCIALISTS and COMMUNISTS politicians, who promised every body that voting for them would give the Greeks a continous prosperity. The retirement age kept getting lower and lower, to the point that GREEKS can retire at age 50, with full retirement pay, equal to their salary. Eventually, the money ran out, and all the Greek government can do is borrow the money. What was it that Maggie Thatcher said about LIBERALS, SOCIALISTS and COMMUNISTS will do then they run out of other people’s money? The time has come to pay the piper, and the Greek government don’t want to pay it.
Im so sick of hearing that some deadline is approaching. It reminds me of that Obama birth cirtificate thing that some African Chief Walawaladingdong kept saying was going to be released in 24 hrs. Just 24 more hours Just 24 more hours!
The money Greece is trying to borrow is to be used to pay back previous loans, it is not an “investment” into business or infrastructure.
If there’s a lot of expensive purchasing lately, it would indicate that all of those loans ended up in the pockets of the elite. And the “little folk” in Greece are supposed to suffer even more to pay back the debt? It’s just like here, in some ways. They got no benefit, yet they’re told “pay up”.
Why?
Becuz they HAVEN’T GOT THE MUNNNIEEE!
The Real question should be ‘who the hell would lend to such deadbeats in the first place’??
ANSWER: We wuvv the EU sooo much—and we wuvv the POWER THAT IT GIVES US even more. So-we keep feeding the dead horse in hopes that it will get up and sing.
Hey, Fritz—got any more spare change??
REALLY—COUGH IT UP!! NOW!
Go to Athens, Greece for a one-week vacation, and take the bus tour of the harbor. Once you stand there and gaze at over a minimum of 200 one-million-dollar or more yachts, and then you count at least two-thousand high-end sports cars around the harbor area of Athens...you come to ask if there is not a taxation problem.
Then you go back 2,500 years and discover that taxation avoidance started all the way back to that point. No guy who owns a hotel or high-end restaurant or franchise grocery operation....admits to any legit profits. Everything is hidden and done on the side. I won’t say this is the entire problem, but probably thirty-percent of the big issue of debt in Greece.
I have very little sympathy for the Greeks. These are people who basically refuse to pay taxes to their own Government, and the Government does nothing.
And, no, they won’t pay back any of their foreign debts, unless its to some country they KNOW will hurt them. Like Russia.
Yes, it’s all about creating the ILLUSION of EU unity. These “negotiators” must know that there is zero chance of them getting any of their $$ back. Russia is watching all this and laughing, but the Greeks are looking to them to be their next sucker.
I say: Let them eat hyperinflation!
When we were in Greece a few years ago we noticed they have rebar and concrete blocks on the second floor of their “unfinished” houses...therefore, they don’t have to pay taxes because it is unfinished. Also, at a cafe we sat for some great coffee. There were no woman there in the middle of the day. I asked one of the men where the women were. He replied “at work where they should be”. They hung out for hours sipping their coffee. In the cities there were many ostentatious displays of wealth. The countryside seemed to have many poor people.
AND, you krauts ... pay us the damn $56B pounds ... now!
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