Hey Greeks

[Genius Gone Insane]

Seeing that you are the most important people in the world right now and in the middle of the spotlight, I'm kind of curious as to what it's like over there right now.

I don't trust the media's story on this.

What are your people saying right now? What's the attitude on the street?

Also, FWIW Glenn Beck thinks everything is your fault and that you guys are about to go crazy left or crazy right. I don't listen to what he says but a lot of Americans do.

 

[TheSlanderer]

Please inform Glenn Beck that the swords and shields are ready, once the helmets are done we are invading the US. We'll be swimming to your shores so NORAD won't even see us coming.

Other than than life is great in a place that's in its 6th straight year of recession, 25% of the population is unemployed and no matter what people vote, someone else's government will decide our economic future.

 

[hsinn3r]

Please inform Glenn Beck that the swords and shields are ready, once the helmets are done we are invading the US. We'll be swimming to your shores so NORAD won't even see us coming.

Nah, we'll just use the ancient submarines developed during the Peloponnesian war.

Sarcasm aside, it ain't good. Being an observer/tourist you wouldn't notice something is wrong, but living here and having to cope economically on an impossible situation is pretty difficult.

Confusion and uncertainty.

 

[Genius Gone Insane]

Anger?

 

[FIXXXER]

Anger?

you mean Hanger right!?

 

[hsinn3r]

you mean Hanger right!?

Something like this?

To paraphrase Yoda :

"Hanger leads to anger; anger leads to hate; hate leads to suffering."

 

[Vaggelis_Revolted]

The basic wage is being reduced to over 50% (in only a few years), and most labour rights are being limited or completely withdrawn.

Many people voted against this politic and against the political parties that support these measures of injustice.

The elections will be re-held next month. There is a great effort to persuade us that we have no other choice than following the economic program of IMF. People are somewhat "dizzy" and confused, while the political scene is unstable and unclear. (Its worth mentioning that neo-nazis have earned almost 7% at recent elections!)

I don't trust the media's story on this.

This is very logical! Here in Greece, media are trying to terrorize the people. Most famous journalists are corrupted and the propaganda against those who disagree with the gonverment is almost unbearable.

 

[Genius Gone Insane]

Here in the USA they keep saying that if Greece decides to drop off the Euro it will cause financial chaos in Greece and ruin the country.

I wonder if they are saying that just to scare the Greeks into staying on the Euro so that the EU won't suffer. I am not a financial expert, but I would say your country is pretty much fucked if you stay on the Euro. At least if you drop the Euro you may have a fighting chance to start over.

 

[Genius Gone Insane]

Also, even if you stay on the Euro, you'll be better off if you bluff first and tell them you are going back to the Drachma. From the horse's mouth, they'll negotiate before letting you go to the Drachma:

"We don't think Greece will walk away, even if the result after the June 17 election is difficult for the pro-bailout parties," he said in a May 21 interview on Bloomberg Television's "The Pulse" with Maryam Nemazee. "We don't think they will deliberately step away from the bailout. There will be a process of negotiation in a worst-case scenario, but we don't believe a Greek exit is going to happen."

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/artic...rticlesM4DXI81A74E901-M4GNB.DTL#ixzz1vis4ckEc

 

[Mutant]

Basically it is like a choice between getting a kick in the nuts (massive spending cuts) and having the dick and balls cut off completely for the Greeks now (if they let the situation get out of control).

They are so afraid of getting the kick that they will cause a total disaster...

All sane foreign investors are running away with their money now.

If they decide to stop paying off the debt, they wont get any more help from Europe and this will mean no funds for basic structures of the country, massive riots, most probably martial law, people dying on streets, refugees fleeing the country... the fall of the whole country.


Btw what would you call a man who you loaned 10000$ to and he suddenly said "i enjoyed the money, i had a very good life for few weeks but won't repay the debt and it is your fault because you should not trust me in the first place" ?

 

[JeffTD]

Krugman laid it out pretty well (if a bit rashly) a week or so back: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/eurodammerung-2/?smid=tw-NytimesKrugman&seid=auto

1. Greek euro exit, very possibly next month.

2. Huge withdrawals from Spanish and Italian banks, as depositors try to move their money to Germany.

3a. Maybe, just possibly, de facto controls, with banks forbidden to transfer deposits out of country and limits on cash withdrawals.

3b. Alternatively, or maybe in tandem, huge draws on ECB credit to keep the banks from collapsing.

4a. Germany has a choice. Accept huge indirect public claims on Italy and Spain, plus a drastic revision of strategy — basically, to give Spain in particular any hope you need both guarantees on its debt to hold borrowing costs down and a higher eurozone inflation target to make relative price adjustment possible; or:

4b. End of the euro.

 

[Genius Gone Insane]

Btw what would you call a man who you loaned 10000$ to and he suddenly said "i enjoyed the money, i had a very good life for few weeks but won't repay the debt and it is your fault because you should not trust me in the first place" ?

I would call him financially irresponsible, just like the millions of Americans that bought homes on interest only loans and then couldn't pay them off.

The difference is that the financially irresponsible Americans can claim bankruptcy without destroying their childrens' futures. Greeks do not have this luxury.

Blaming Greeks and low-income Americans for defaulting is analagous to asking a 4 year old to hold on to a chocolate bar for you and then getting upset at him after he eats it.

 

[LeSedna]

^
for the 4b line (the very last line is missing by the way, the one where he states "in the very few months") : Every few months someone says things are gonna truly collapse for europe in a very very short time (the end of the Euro has been forecast for "in the next few months"... 20 times now ?). And it's been like that for years. Event though it IS in a big crisis, and that the Euro IS threatened, I'm always very careful with such specialist predictions. This kind of announcement just make things worse because people start giving credit to them, but Nobel Prize or not they are most of the time exaggerated and self advertisement. Again I don't say there is nothing, or that those specialists don't know their stuff, but they always "predict" a very exaggerated way, while real things are slower than that.

Other than the time factor, for what I can understand, that could be true. All greek people have started retiring their money from banks because in case of devaluation at least their money won't disappear as much. A smart move individually, but exactly what you need to make a country collapse.

A person I met who lived in greece told me that one of the big problems in greece has been that people exchange services too much between them, up to house building or big things like that on a bigger scale, which in this case doesn't create economic growth because there is no money transiting through taxes, state, banks, and all. If you push the logic to the extreme, if everyone did that, then a society cannot sustain itself because its purpose is to average things between people to create minimum services, insurances, public services etc. So shortcutting the state too much could have been a problem. Seems like it participated in a bigger difference between rich and poor people, and the current crisis they are facing. Would this be possibly true or just a cliché ?

 

[Mutant]

Blaming Greeks and low-income Americans for defaulting is analagous to asking a 4 year old to hold on to a chocolate bar for you and then getting upset at him after he eats it.

I blame Greeks who voted for socialists and populists.
I blame American way of living that emotionally forces young people ("hahahaha ! look at him ! he is still living at his mothers and he is 24 !")to take a huge loan to move to "their own" house as soon as they are done with education.

 

[crillemannen]

Well the greeks cheated their way into the EURO from the start, so of course they should be blamed. Just a shame that the rest of the world will suffer.

 

[LeSedna]

I'm not familiar with all this, I just started following all of this last year or so. So where did greece cheat as people state it ?

 

[StefTD]

I think one of the problems, from the start, was that some politicans thought "yeah, let's try this Euro-thing"
but they didn't want to change anything for it-if you get what I mean.
I have a few good friends from Greece (between 16-50) and most of them went to Germany because they
thought it's unstable to live there and lots of things are just strange, like many people building houses, but
not finishing them so they don't have to pay taxes for the houses.
There was an interview for example with a Doc from Greece who said that most of the people who come to
him just pay him in cash, so he doesn't have to bill them, that way he's able to only pay taxes as if he would
earn 800€ per month, but in the end he actually earned between 10-12k € per month, just think about the
dimensions that occur if only 5-10% of the population do something like that (sure, most of them won't earn
10-12k &#8364 for a few years millions and millions weren't spent where they should have been spent.

The dad of a friend of mine (a Greek, too) said that there are alot of people who just think that it's ok to not
pay your taxes as you should, but at the same time they want other countries to help them and as soon as
somebody mentions that they just should pay there taxes and work longer they go crazy.
Sure, not everyone there is like that (probably only a few) but he just told me that the last time he went to
Greece (a few weeks ago) somebody mentioned that it sucks sooo much that he has to work until he's 62
and how cruel that some Germans want them to work even longer-he said that he lives in Germany and has
to work until he's 67 and that it's normal over here (at least to 65)-the other guy was speechless.

 

[John_C]

sort by hours worked. Interesting.

http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=LEVEL#

 

[LeSedna]

^
So basically what he just told me.

We have sort of the same problem in france. France has had wonderful things thanks to the 50s to 80s, when it was rebuilding from the WW and being in a good growth, the state could afford the 35h week, the low retirement age etc. But since the 2000s it's not possible anymore to sustain these, and the state now faces the malcontents every time they want to change something. And then the people complains about the shitty growth and that their salaries are stuck (I'm making a generality as well here, again the pb are never 100% of people).

There is no surprise germany has a better growth at the moment. They are more pragmatic, and especially, people don't complain as much. If it's good or not all in all I don't know yet, but people are more productive individually. I can even tell in the airports, in germany the ground crew does their job and their number is normal and they really don't lose time on each aircraft, while when you go in italy or spain, you have 4 or 5 people watching 2 or 3 work sometimes. In spain you have a marshaller car even when the taxiing (when the aircraft rolls in the airport) is short and obvious. The fueler is twice as slow as in other countries (some are good but most of the time they are just plain lazy). They have built a few brand new airport terminals (I'm thinking Santiago as my first example) while it was not necessary and there is never more than a few aircraft at the same time there. It's just a waste of money that is probably worth hundreds of million euros just in this airport.

 

[LeSedna]

sort by hours worked. Interesting.

http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=LEVEL#

Yeah but at the same time Norway is very expensive to live in so I don't know how much a comparison you can make with that. I don't know how much the different levels of life cost matter ?