Greece Referendum

[Ginny]

Can anyone please explain to me what is happening with the Euro and Greece? I dont understand how so many countries are using the same currency yet one manages to fuck it up and cause this much shit.

 

I dont understand how to reduce debt or payback to other countires when you're in debt yourself. How is that other countries like Germany seem like they've got their shit together and have enough to bail people out?

 

I'm confused :wallbutt:

[PestiRed]

You know when a woman gets a credit card & builds up a massive pile of debt treating herself to shoes, manicures & all sorts of shit she can't afford, then the bank asks for the money back, threatens to knacker credit ratings at the address. Then the husband steps in & sorts out paying it back by digging into his savings, giving up his season ticket & working 20 extra shifts a week

Greece = irresponsible, brain-dead wife who won't get a job

Germany = long-suffering husband

Eurozone = marriage you can't leave because assets are tied together

 

Except Germany won't even get a compensatory suck-treat

[Ginny]

You know when a woman gets a credit card & builds up a massive pile of debt treating herself to shoes, manicures & all sorts of shit she can't afford, then the bank asks for the money back, threatens to knacker credit ratings at the address. Then the husband steps in & sorts out paying it back by digging into his savings, giving up his season ticket & working 20 extra shifts a week

Greece = irresponsible, brain-dead wife who won't get a job

Germany = long-suffering husband

Eurozone = marriage you can't leave because assets are tied together

 

Except Germany won't even get a compensatory suck-treat

 

haha, awesome mate. That makes the most sense of any explanation i've heard so far!

[danielo]

You know when a woman gets a credit card & builds up a massive pile of debt treating herself to shoes, manicures & all sorts of shit she can't afford, then the bank asks for the money back, threatens to knacker credit ratings at the address. Then the husband steps in & sorts out paying it back by digging into his savings, giving up his season ticket & working 20 extra shifts a week

Greece = irresponsible, brain-dead wife who won't get a job

Germany = long-suffering husband

Eurozone = marriage you can't leave because assets are tied together

 

Except Germany won't even get a compensatory suck-treat

 

You should become an economics lecturer sir.

[matthewsamson]

You know when a woman gets a credit card & builds up a massive pile of debt treating herself to shoes, manicures & all sorts of shit she can't afford, then the bank asks for the money back, threatens to knacker credit ratings at the address. Then the husband steps in & sorts out paying it back by digging into his savings, giving up his season ticket & working 20 extra shifts a week

Greece = irresponsible, brain-dead wife who won't get a job

Germany = long-suffering husband

Eurozone = marriage you can't leave because assets are tied together

 

Except Germany won't even get a compensatory suck-treat

 

Anybody want to try another explanation ?

[brucespanner]

Anybody want to try another explanation ?

 

Nope, that was perfect!

 

Well done that man.

[Ginny]

Anybody want to try another explanation ?

 

nah, i'm satisfied. lets not muddy the waters here

[Xherdan]

DOes this wife have good tits?

[PestiRed]

DOes this wife have good tits?

 

She had cosmetic surgery on the credit card

[Ginny]

I've got another question.

 

So... Germany and other contries have agreed to bail Greece out. Am I right in thinking that Greece havent yet agreed to the bail-out but have put this up for a public vote to decide whether to take the bail-out or return to their old currency... the Dracmah? :|

[PestiRed]

Yep, polls seem to indicate that most Greeks are against the terms of the bail-out but still want to be in the euro. Wording of the referendum question will be key - can they reject the terms but still stay?

Rest of Eurozone may have to decide whether to kick Greece out of the Euro - they seem to be indicating that this will be the likely result - however it may be a bluff to get them to back down on the referendum

[Mr. Beast]

charles hugh smith-EU Leaders Throw Europe a Plutonium Life Preserver

 

 

EU Leaders Throw Europe a Plutonium Life Preserver (October 27, 2011)

 

The euro system was doomed from inception for fundamental reasons; trying to conjure up "something for nothing" solutions will fail catastrophically, and soon.

 

As Europe flails helplessly in the waves of insolvency, its leadership has tossed it a life preserver. Too bad it's plutonium, and will take Europe straight to the bottom. Plutonium is of course one of the most toxic materials on the planet, and the "rescue" cooked up by the EU leadership is the financial equivalent of plutonium.

 

Stripped of propaganda and disinformation, the "rescue" boils down to this: something for nothing. Sound familiar? Isn't "something for nothing" what inflated the bubbles which have popped so violently? The EU "rescue" conjures something for nothing in two ways:

 

1. The financial alchemist's favorite magic: leverage. Take a couple hundred billion euros in cash, leverage it up with various magic (unlimited power is now at your fingertips!) and voila, you can suddenly backstop 1 trillion euros of banking-sector losses, all with illusory money. Something for nothing.

 

2. "Guarantees" to cover the first 20% of loan losses. This is being presented as the equivalent of 100% guarantees, because it is inconceivable that losses could exceed 20%. In other words, the credulous buyer of at-risk Euroland bonds is supposed to be reassured enough to load the wagon because 20% of the bond is backstopped.

 

This is something for nothing because the EU leadership is explicitly claiming the at-risk portion--80% of every bond--is somehow "safer" because the first 20% will be paid by EU taxpayers.

 

In essence, the EU is claiming that its illusory "something for nothing" magic will turn lead into gold. Abracadabra....oh well, close; it's heavy, it's metallic--oops, it's plutonium.

 

The leadership is resorting to Cargo Cult incantations and legerdemain because the alternative is to raise the 1 trillion euros in cold hard cash needed to bail out the first wave of failed banks and underwater bondholders by raising taxes and cutting budgets, i.e. austerity. (Recall that the total bill will be at least 3 trillion euros, so 1 trillion is just a down payment.)

 

Raising cash the hard way is politically unacceptable in both France and Germany, not to mention every other nation in the EU, so the political lackeys of the banking sector and bondholders are cravenly substituting a "something for nothing" magic show which they hope will fool the global bond market.

 

Note to EU lackeys: there is no free lunch. Leverage is plutonium, not gold, and guaranteeing the first 20% of bonds that are doomed to lose 40%-75% is not terribly appealing to anyone not influenced by the ECB's mind tricks. ("These are not the euros you're looking for; move along.")

 

No wonder France was so anxious for the ECB to crank up the euro printing press: they wanted-- just like everyone else involved--something for nothing.

 

The best way to understand the EU's current situation is to imagine an astoundingly dysfunctional family of deep-in-denial-addicts, screaming co-dependent parents, and grown-up grifters acting like spoiled brats, all trapped in a rat-infested, flooded flat that's had the gas turned off for lack of payment--and there's a plutonium life preserver glowing in the knee-high water. Admittedly, this analogy is imperfect, but it does capture the essential psychology of the end-game being played out.

 

A slightly more formal model for understanding the increasingly unstable dynamics of the EU is the post-colonial "plantation" model I've described here before. The key characteristics of the Colonial Model of Capitalism are:

 

1. Low cost labor and low-value materials flow from the periphery (colonies) to the Empire (center), which then ships high-value, high-profit finished goods back to the colonies.

 

2. The colonies must buy the high-value finished goods on credit that is issued and controlled by the Imperial center.

 

Hmm--doesn't this sound like the relationship of Germany to the European periphery? The euro cemented this co-dependency: Germany had the most efficient production, and once the euro raised the cost of production in the periphery nations, then of course nobody could beat Germany's cost advantages. The euro actually lowered Germany's cost of production in terms of foreign exchange rates while raising the costs in periphery nations that were previously able to lower their cost of production via currency devaluations.

 

Having surrendered that mechanism to access the deep credit markets of the center, then they had no choice but to buy the high-margin finished goods from Germany, as nobody else could make the same goods for the low German price.

 

These booming high-profit German exports of finished goods to the European periphery generated vast surpluses of capital that were then loaned to the periphery to enable their further purchases of German goods. Why risk the heavy investment costs of production in the periphery when Germany had the lowest costs of production and was willing to loan the buyers the cash needed to keep buying?

 

It's the classic mercantilist-consumer co-dependency on a gigantic scale, with low-cost credit fueling both increased consumption and production. As long as the credit flowed in vast torrents of low-cost, easy to borrow money, the co-dependency looked like a "virtuous cycle." Debt junkies eventually have to start servicing their debts, of course, and that's when the ugly realities of colonial dominance become visible.

 

Germany casts itself in this melodrama as the wronged party, the industrious craftsfolk churning out high-quality goods who have somehow been lured into pouring hard-earned cash down various ratholes to save nefarious EU banks--including their own.

 

But setting aside the melodrama for a moment, let's ask: how many German goods would have been imported by the EU periphery if those nations had been forced to pay cash for everything from the start? Precious little is the answer; the cash--in the form of actual surpluses available to spend on imports--would have run out immediately after the euro was launched.

 

In other words, the debt orgy enabled not just carefree consumption, it also enabled vast German exports to the Eurozone. Now we start seeing how the once-mutually beneficial co-dependency has become toxic: now that the periphery's debtors have become debt-serfs, German exports to the periphery are contracting.

 

This helps explain why even the supposedly prudent Germans are seeking something for nothing as the painless answer to an intrinsically unstable and self-destructive system. When it all implodes, German exports to the periphery will be a shadow of their past glory, and the surpluses which enabled the leveraged orgy of credit will dwindle. (Germany's other big export markets, China and the U.S., are also contracting.)

 

Sovereign currencies are the only mechanism for discounting differences in credit worthiness and production costs. The euro was established as the currency equivalent of gold, holding the same value in every member country. But the mercantilist/quasi-colonial model requires credit to flow from the center to the periphery, and that is precisely what has happened in the EU.

 

In the colonial model, the colonists are indebted and poor. The net value of their labor flows to the Imperial center as interest payments, and the banks at the center set the cost of money and the terms--naturally.

 

This co-dependency based on credit flowing from the mercantilist center to the periphery is both exploitative and systemically unstable. Now that the ontological instability of the euro is being revealed, the dysfunctional family members are blaming each other and desperately trying to conjure up something for nothing to bail themselves out of a system which was doomed to implode from its very inception.

 

All the complexity and confusion distills down to this: the EU leadership needs something for nothing to save the EU, but there is no free lunch. There is only one solution to the exploitation, the illusory leverage, the crushing debts: massive write-offs of all the bad debt everywhere in the EU. And since debt is someone else's asset, then that means writing down the assets, too. The only way to clear the insolvency is to write off 3 trillion euros of debt-based assets and re-enable sovereign currencies. Anything else is simply more tiresome melodrama.

 

very interesting take on things this - but doesn't highlight the core of the problem - if it just was a bad £100bn debt or whatever the size is, it could be managable - the problem is that bad debt, which itself was never repayable due to much of it immediately leaving the country and on the whole being put to completely unproductive use. that single debt has been fraudulently repackaged by investment banks, and used as collateral to create a whole universe of new debt based products and financial instruments with a much greater exposure that has nothing whatsoever to do with the Greek people. So if that debt defaults it's not just 100bn on the line, it's an amount none of these bankers are able to even calculate. we're basically trying to postpone the moment we have to reassess our peculiar wedding to the financial capitalism, carrying on as usual, trying to save an economically flawed concept in the Euro, all at the behest of the people who engineered this crisis. Countries default all the time, it's often in their interests,and under international law you can make arguments to repudiate alot of this debt, the banks and the guys with the massive political projects should be the ones with a lot more too lose here.

[Section_31]

I would be wary of classifying Greece as some kind of irresponsible freeloaders, that's the spiel we're being fed, much like all the talk of the demonstators outside St Paul's going home at night and loving their Starbucks. It's an information age and the missiles are words, unfortunately the right have most of the rocket launchers.

New Statesman - The heresy of the Greeks offers hope

 

As Britain's political class pretends that its arranged marriage of Tweedledee to Tweedledum is democracy, the inspiration for the rest of us is Greece. It is hardly surprising that Greece is presented not as a beacon, but as a "junk country" getting its comeuppance for its "bloated public sector" and "culture of cutting corners" (Observer). The heresy of Greece is that the uprising of its ordinary people provides an authentic hope unlike that lavished upon the warlord in the White House.

 

The crisis that has led to Greece's "rescue" by European banks and the International Monetary Fund is the product of a grotesque financial system that itself is in crisis. Greece is a microcosm of a modern class war rarely reported as such, but waged with all the urgency of panic among the imperial rich.

 

What makes Greece different is that it has experienced, within living memory, invasion, foreign occupation, military dictatorship and popular resistance. Ordinary people are not cowed by the corrupt corporatism that dominates the European Union. The right-wing government of Kostas Karamanlis that preceded the present Pasok (Labour) government of George Papandreou was described by the sociologist Jean Ziegler as "a machine for systematically pillaging the country's resources".

 

Epic theft

The machine had infamous friends. The US Federal Reserve board is investigating the role of Goldman Sachs, which gambled on the bankruptcy of Greece as public assets were sold off and its tax-evading rich deposited €360bn in Swiss banks. This haemorrhaging of capital continues with the approval of Europe's central banks and governments.

 

At 11 per cent, Greece's budget deficit is no higher than America's. However, when the Papandreou government tried to borrow on the international capital market, it was effectively blocked by the US corporate ratings agencies, which "downgraded" Greek debt to "junk". These same agencies gave triple-A ratings to billions of dollars in so-called sub-prime mortgage securities and so precipitated the economic collapse in 2008.

What has happened in Greece is theft on an epic, though not unfamiliar, scale. In Britain, the "rescue" of banks such as Northern Rock and the Royal Bank of Scotland has cost billions of pounds. Thanks to Gordon Brown and his passion for the avaricious instincts of the City, these gifts of public money were unconditional, and the bankers have continued to pay each other the booty they call bonuses and to spirit it away to tax havens. Under Britain's political monoculture, they can do as they wish. In the US, the situation is even more remarkable. As the investigative journalist David DeGraw has reported, the principal Wall Street banks that "destroyed the economy pay zero in taxes and get $33bn in refunds".

 

In Greece, as in America and Britain, the ordinary people have been told they must repay the debts of the rich and powerful who incurred them. Jobs, pensions and public services are to be slashed and burned, with privateers put in charge. For the EU and the IMF, the opportunity presents to "change the culture" and to dismantle the social welfare of Greece, just as the IMF and the World Bank have "structurally adjusted" (impoverished and controlled) countries across the developing world.

 

Greece is hated for the same reason Yugo*slavia had to be destroyed physically behind a pretence of protecting the people of Kosovo. Most Greeks are employed by the state, and the young and the trade unions comprise a popular alliance that has not been pacified; the colonels' tanks on the campus of Athens University in 1967 remain a political spectre. Such resistance is anathema to Europe's central bankers and regarded as an obstruction to German capital's need to capture markets in the aftermath of Germany's troubled reunification.

 

Shock therapy

In Britain, such has been the 30-year propaganda of an extreme economic theory known first as monetarism, then as neoliberalism, that the new Prime Minister can, like his predecessor, describe his demands that ordinary people pay the debts of crooks as "fiscally responsible". The unmentionables are poverty and class.

 

Almost a third of British children remain below the breadline. In working-class Kentish Town in London, male life expectancy is 70. Two miles away, in Hampstead, it is 80. When Russia was subjected to similar "shock therapy" in the 1990s, life expectancy nosedived. In the United States, a record 40 million cannot afford to feed themselves.

 

In the developing world, a system of triage imposed by the World Bank and the IMF has long determined whether people live or die. Whenever tariffs and food and fuel subsidies are eliminated by IMF diktat, small farmers know they have been declared expendable. The World Resources Institute estimates that the toll reaches between 13 and 18 million child deaths every year. This, wrote the economist Lester C Thurow, is "neither metaphor nor simile of war, but war itself".

 

The same imperial forces have used horrific weapons against stricken countries where children are the majority, and approved torture as an instrument of foreign policy. It is a phenomenon of denial that none of these assaults on humanity, in which Britain is actively engaged, was allowed to intrude on the British election.

 

The people on the streets of Athens do not suffer this malaise. They are clear who the enemy is and regard themselves as once again under foreign occupation. And once again, they are rising up, with courage. When David Cameron begins to cleave £6bn from public services in Britain, he will be bargaining that Greece will not happen in Britain. We should prove him wrong.

 

[Tyler Durden]

How the fuck an entire government and it's people can be at the mercy of banks is a disgrace. I hope they default, maybe when all these banks don't get any money back hopefully things might change for the better, it benefitted Argentina to do it

[VladimirIlyich]

I posted an article regarding iceland on another thread,maybe its relevant to Greece too.

[bossy]

I posted an article regarding iceland on another thread,maybe its relevant to Greece too.

 

I reckon it is; iceland's population might be tiny in comparison but it's debt was massive. The country basically let the banks hang themselves.

[KopOut]

Here ya go Ginny - a clear concise SHORT video on what's happened.

 

Jawwad Farid's Videos | Facebook

[KopOut]

Here's a great example of a country that defaulted on it's debt and went on very quickly to a massive recovery -Europe should take note.

 

"The Argentine economy has grown 94 percent for the years 2002-2011, using International Monetary Fund projections for the end of this year. This is the fastest growth in the Western Hemisphere for this period, and among the highest growth rates in the world."

 

The Argentine Success Story and its Implications | Reports

[melons]

I reckon Argentina's situation is all down to having a woman in charge, see what can be done when you get someone who's brain isn't in their testes?

[VladimirIlyich]

I reckon Argentina's situation is all down to having a woman in charge, see what can be done when you get someone who's brain isn't in their testes?

 

You obviously weren't around between 1979-1990 in this country.

[Einch]

Don't forget that Germany benefits from the artificial depression of the cost of their exports as a result of the Euro. They need this to work and to stay in their control as it has done all along. In my opinion the French, who think they have been in the driving seat, have been used by Germany all along. The French dream of European domination was never a match for the German version backed by their retained manufacturing excellence and this is shown now. The Germans already have the ability to go back to the D-mark and have had a dry-run of the central bank cut-over.

 

I stick by my earlier view that this all leads to war. Perhaps not in the next two years but it will come as there is no easy way out of the shit the cunts have put us.

[Mr. Beast]

Good video here from Real News Network, from July but nothing's exactly changed.

[YOUTUBE]-fWlCJp95CE[/YOUTUBE]

[bri]

France an Germany (banks) stand to lose the most if the Greeks decide to fuck it all off and don't accept the bailout package.

 

The bailout package from the IMF is basically some hard bastard loan shark who you owe who by way of payment wants to shag your bird in front of you. Not only that he gonna kick her back door in and He's gonna come round for the next 50 years

[melons]

You obviously weren't around between 1979-1990 in this country.

 

I'm still not sure she's a woman, actually i'm still not convinced she's human.

[VladimirIlyich]

I'm still not sure she's a woman, actually i'm still not convinced she's human.

 

Fair comment.

 

I think she could have been one of these.