Posted on 05/02/2016 7:31:15 AM PDT by Lorianne
Greece is running out of money. The government in Athens is raiding the budgets of the health service and public utilities to pay salaries and pensions. Without fresh financial support it will struggle to make a debt payment due in July.
No, this is not a piece from the summer of 2015 reprinted by mistake. Greece, after a spell out of the limelight, is back. Another summer of threats, brinkmanship and all-night summits looms.
The problem is a relatively simple one. Greece is bridling at the unrealistic demands of the European commission and the International Monetary Fund to agree to fresh austerity measures when, as the IMF itself accepts, hospitals are running out of syringes and buses don’t run because of a lack of spare parts.
Athens has already pushed through a package of austerity measures worth €5.4bn (£4.23bn) as the price of receiving an €86bn bailout agreed at the culmination of last summer’s protracted crisis and expected the deal to be finalised last October.
Disbursements of the loan have been held up, however, because neither the commission or the IMF believe that Greece will make the promised savings. So they are demanding that Alexis Tsipras’s government legislate for additional “contingency measures” worth €3.6bn to be triggered in the event that Greece fails to meet its fiscal targets.
This is almost inevitable, given that the target is for the country to run a primary budget surplus of 3.5% of gross domestic product by 2018 and in every year thereafter. This means that once Greece’s debt payments are excluded, tax receipts have to exceed public spending by 3.5% of GDP. The exceptionally onerous terms are supposed to whittle away Greece’s debt mountain, currently just shy of 200% of GDP.
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
First they shoot you up with juice, then they want some of it back, year after year. Like slavery it is.
Recovery Plan for Greece:
1. Exit the EU
2. Default on all debt
3. Issue new Drachmas
4. No more government pensions - live within your means
5. Put the Army and Navy on the borders - shoot to kill any “migrant”
6. Put a bounty on “migrants” already in Greece to be deported. Use the Army, Police, Boy Scouts, etc. Send everyone home and they will stop coming
Everybody chip in and build a permanent Olympic Village in Greece. Hold the Summer Games there every four years and Greece gets an automatic economic stimulus, and the graft and corruption is taken out of the Olympic Selection Committee process.
All these bailouts do is push back the inevitable a year or two. But it the process they will hasten the destruction of the countries doing the bailing out. Lose-lose all around.
Let the pendulum swing.
Let it swing all the way back.
This is the key... tell your early retirees they have two years to get a job and then pensions will be delayed until retirement age. Should be done here, too...
Greece needs to collapse its public sector and all those welfare babies need to go around Europe looking for jobs, just like the Eastern Europeans have had to do.
A bounty on invaders is a great idea for Greece, the EU and the US.
your proposals make perfect sense, but this is everything the statists, progressives and proto-fascist empire builders in Brussels are against.
Therefore, there is no chance of it happening.
The problem with the European Union is that money flows from countries that produce to basket-case countries that cry and moan and beg for money.
Greece should follow a plan similar to that which was used in Weimar Germany, and tragically, recovered its economy just in time for the Nazis to take over. But the recovery plan still worked.
Germany’s problems began with its horrific war debt. France openly wanted to destroy Germany’s economy to reduce it from an industrial nation to an agrarian one. It demanded prompt repayment of Germany’s debt under threat of a military occupation to force repayment.
However, at the onset of war, Germany had replaced its gold backed currency, the Goldmark, with a fiat currency, the Papiermark. So with enormous demands for reparations, the German government started printing Papiermarks like there was no tomorrow. They wanted inflation, because inflation favors debtors. But they got hyperinflation, and the Papiermark became worthless.
So how to get out of the hole?
The US sent over an executive of General Electric, who came up with the idea of first creating a new currency, called the Rentenmark, that would again be backed by gold. But it would not be a public currency, but reserved for government, bank, and corporate use only. The idea was that resolving debt at the top of the economy would make it easier to repair the economy on the street.
They were right. After the Rentenmark did its work, the worthless Papiermark was replaced with the new Reichsmark, also backed by gold. In fact the Reichsmark was so stable that even the Nazis avoided tampering with it. It survived the war, only to be replaced by the Deutschmark, another fiat currency.
In any event, for this idea to work in Greece would first require them to leave the Euro. The Grexit. While still using Euros for a time, they would then create a new, if not just gold, than specie backed high level only currency.
This would pave the way for a return to the specie backed Drachma.
Not everyone will lose — the people collecting the interest and their attorneys will ALWAYS get theirs and win. The don’t give a crap about principal unless the folks that provided the stakes (depositors) show up in large numbers to get their own principal back. Of course, the bankers have and answer to that too as the folks in Cyprus found out a couple of years back.
I laugh at them.
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