yep, man, those sacrifices would mean that some bondholders in Germany will get their half-percent... I'm really feeling for your people - i myself lived through pretty devastating (or as it happened - transforming) years 25 years ago in USSR/Russia and such things are brutal to regular people.
Anyway, just compare - having your own currency, you could have covered the 14% deficit just by printing those money - it would have caused a few percent of inflation, like 5-6%. Few years ago US had like 3 times bigger deficit than that Greece's deficit (and FY2014 US deficit is about the same as Greece's) and just kept printing the money with official inflation less than 2% or something like this. And unemployment situation is among all times best today.
Perhaps most glaring is the ECB's current Quantitative Easing effort to the tune of 1 trillion euros, buying assets and bonds in every country but greece [1]. This devaluing of currency is paid for by all users of the Euro, including greek. And yet it is used to prop up the same banks and countries greek lends from on conditions of austerity?
1. http://www.ecb.europa.eu/mopo/implement/omt/html/index.en.ht...
Please tell me you were making a joke.
Trying to collect WW2 "debt" from Germany? Using "insulted dignity" as an argument in financial negotiations? Deliberately setting up the referendum after the deadline and then "pleading" for extension? Really? He is pulling all the stops, granted, but they are nothing short of sleazy and obnoxious. If EU are to cave in, it would basically mean that EU is susceptible to blatant manipulation. So they won't.
The only way out of this mess is for the referendum to resolve with Yes, for Tsipras to step down and his replacement to agree to whatever the last EU proposal was. Tsipras tried the unorthodox approach and it didn't work, not much left he can do now but to leave.
The second debt relates to an official loan that Hitler took in gold from our central bank. It is documented and is considered a state loan. We have every fucking right to claim it. It is somewhere between 8 and 12 billion Euros by today standards.
By the way, back in 1954 the Greek government agreed to write off a big part of the German debt owed to us [1]. Those are state loans completely independent to war reparations. So while we did it for them they deny it to us. And we did it while our economy was in a far worse state than German economy is today.
The problem we have with Germans is that they’re ungrateful pricks.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Agreement_on_German_Ext...
Incorrect. West Germany paid 115 million Deutschmarks to Greek victims of Nazi crimes in 1960 (a lot more than the $45 million reparations that were demanded by the 1947 Paris Peace Treaty), while victims of the forced labour camps were also compensated individually.
Shame on you for spreading bald faced lies.
http://www.truth-out.org/speakout/item/24456-the-math-of-mas...
Concerning Greece remaining in the EU and the Euro, you do have a choice. It would be short-sighted to expel Greece. You see, everybody just has to learn their lesson. In the future, don't let your commercial banks buy too much Greek debt paper, because you will end up paying instead. It takes two to tango. There's no point in blaming just one side of the equation. The other side is responsible too.
Greece doesn't sure. But the Greeks do. That is at the very heart of this situation.
There is a Greek proverb saying that when too many roosters sign the dawn comes late.
But there are deeper issues too. What the creditors really want is to micromanage Greece while they do not understand our economy and culture. They want to change everything in a couple of years. Change takes time, you can't turn a Greek into a German or an American in 3 or 5 years.
In order to do this and protect their interests, they support the previous, crooked goverments. These people acted like lapdogs, signing everything the creditors threw at them, whilst implementing only what didn't touch their rich friends.
The creditors did not only got binding agreements through them but also protection. Siemens for example, the German conglomerate that accounts for a large percentage of Germany's GDP has spent over 2 billion euros (!) in bribery to Greek politicians and public servants. If this case ever reached the court, both our politicians would face jail and Siemens wouldn't be able to work with the European public sector again (think from traffic lights, to trains, hospitals, energy, etc). Thus the creditors prefer a goverment that looks like an obedient and honest goverment, whilst it only applies austerity measures for the weak and protect themselves.
Our new goverment seems genuinely interested to make things better, but it asks for the freedom to implement their own ideas in order to reach the targets set by our creditors and also a debt restructure so that our debt becomes sustainable.
You mentioned the Siemens scandal for example, by the way your numbers are off by an order of magnitude. This is a typical example of a cover-up from our part. We let the key witness escape to Germany where he is protected from extradition. It’s not their fault, we shouldn’t have let him leave in the first place. Taking responsibility for our mistakes would be a first step in overcoming our inefficiencies. And the previous government was anything but obedient, as a matter of fact all three governments that were called to implement reforms resisted as much as they could.
So please, let’s just stop the speculation about EU wanting to rule Greece through puppet governments. I’m sure they have better things to do.
Siemens for example [...] has spent over 2 billion euros (!) in bribery to Greek politicians and public servants.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens_Greek_bribery_scandal
Greek here. This is an understatement. While I’ve mentioned in other posts that our economy is faulty, arguing that we didn’t do anything to fix it is awfully wrong. We did a lot. We managed to move from a 14% deficit to a 1% surplus in just four years. Four. Fucking. Years. No other country in the developed world has done such a feat in such a short time. The effect of that was tremendous for the population, 50% of young people are unemployed.
So while we admit our wrongdoings (well at least some of us do) we’d also appreciate if EU could cut us some slack. The reason radicals like Tsipras came into power is the lack of flexibility from EU leaders.
The tip of the iceberg is the report that was published last week from IMF that pretty much described the Greek dept as unsustainable. The report was known to various EU leaders for months but they chose to suppress it. I don’t need to tell you how this looks from our side. It’s preposterous to say the least. They say they don’t trust our government, and I don’t blame them for it, but how could anyone trust them. They’re all cunts.