ex-Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis attacked in central Athens, (broken nose, cuts & bruises), famously took on Obama & European establishment

[basquebromance]

You're a cheap rent boy, aren't you?

there are millions who believe the same way as me. most of them voted for Obama.

 

[Meathead]

Greece’s double misfortune was that income growth in the country had hitherto been fuelled by further debt provided to corporations (often via the Greek state) by the same French and German banks that were lending to the state. The moment these banks panicked and stopped lending to Greece’s public and private sector simultaneously, the game would be up.

Greece's misfortune was using the Euro as its currency thus leaving it unable to devaluate.

Seriously, you don't know wtf you're talking about.

 

[basquebromance]

Economics is really simple.

I’ve got ten pounds in my pocket. If I go out and buy three pints of beer in Cambridge, I’m probably borrowing money. If I carry on doing that, then I’m going to run out of money and I’m going to go bust. It’s not difficult.

 

[basquebromance]

"To put Greek austerity into perspective: in the two years that followed Greece’s ‘rescue’, Spain, another eurozone country caught up in the same mess, was treated to austerity which amounted to a 3.5 per cent reduction in government expenditure. During the same two-year period, 2010 to 2012, Greece experienced a stupendous 15 per cent reduction in government spending. To what effect? Spain’s national income declined by 6.4 per cent while Greece’s by fell by 16 per cent. In Britain, meanwhile, the newly appointed chancellor George Osborne was championing mild austerity as a means of achieving his dream: a balanced government budget by 2020"

 

[basquebromance]

Yanis writes about libertarians:

"What authentic libertarians, Wall Street’s recovering bankers and Anglo-Celtic right-wingers liked about my otherwise left-wing position was precisely that which the Greek and European establishment loathed: a clear opposition to unsustainable, extend-and-pretend loans that repackage bankruptcy as an illiquidity problem. True-blue free marketeers are allergic to taxpayer-funded benevolence. They reject wholeheartedly my views on the desirability of substantial public investment in recessionary times and of tax-mediated income distribution at all times. But we agree that extending a bankruptcy into the future through taxpayer-funded loans is a horrific waste of resources and a gateway to mass misery. Above all else, libertarians understand debt."

 

[basquebromance]

more from Yanis:

"In 2010, for every $100 of income a Greek made, the state owed €146 to foreign banks. A year later, every €100 of income earned in 2010 had shrunk to €91 before shrinking again to €79 by 2012. Meanwhile, as the official loans from European taxpayers came in before being funnelled to France and Germany’s banks, the equivalent government debt rose from €146 in 2010 to €156 in 2011."

Even if God and all the angels were to invade the soul of every Greek tax evader, turning them into a nation of parsimonious Presbyterian Scots, their incomes were too low and debts too high to reverse the bankruptcy. Investors understood this and wouldn’t touch a Greek investment project with a bargepole. The corollary was a humanitarian crisis that ended up bringing people like Yanis into government

 

[basquebromance]

‘I know that this is your thing, but please do not mention debt restructuring tonight. It makes it hard to keep you on air. The government go ballistic when they hear these words.’ - TV station ERT host to Yanis

 

[basquebromance]

"Stripped of its moral weight, austerity emerges as what it is: a failed economic policy founded on unethical moralizing. The reason the establishment found me infuriating was that I had a degree of success in applying cold logic to the problem and thus de-moralizing the debate on Greek debt, utilizing arguments that transcended the divisions between Left and Right and resonated powerfully with segments of both.
This is why, if they had been able, they would have blacklisted me not just from ERT but from every public forum on the continent." - Yanis

 

[Meathead]

‘I know that this is your thing, but please do not mention debt restructuring tonight. It makes it hard to keep you on air. The government go ballistic when they hear these words.’ - TV station ERT host to Yanis

Did you expect the financial powers of Europe to devalue the Euro to save some weak economies that should have never been in the Eurozone in the first place?

Again, I don't care how gay you are, that's just stupid.

 

[ESay]

Greece's misfortune was using the Euro as its currency thus leaving it unable to devaluate.

Seriously, you don't know wtf you're talking about.

Maybe among these misfortunes there are low Greece economy's productivity and corruption?

 

[basquebromance]

Berlin and Paris were coming to the conclusion that Greece needed a new bailout loan, a haircut of some of its debt and a new government.


Their thinking was uncomplicated: the first bailout loan had almost all been spent on shoring up the French and German banks. The Greek state would soon need more money – a great deal more – to continue its pretence of solvency. But just as when you use a credit card to repay a mortgage, your overall debt only rises, so the size of the headline sum to be loaned to Athens as part of the second bailout in 2012 would have given the already fuming parliamentarians throughout Europe a collective stroke if it weren’t accompanied by some kind of haircut. President Sarkozy and Chancellor Merkel resigned themselves to the idea of Greek debt restructuring on condition that it would burn only those creditors who were incapable of harming them much. By the summer of 2011, it was decided: the haircut would mainly hit Greek pension funds, Greek semi-public institutions and Greek savers who had bought government bonds, while the loans provided by the IMF and the European institutions in 2010 would of course remain inviolable.


That this would spell the end of the wretched Papandreou government, which had pushed the first bailout through parliament, was considered an acceptable price to pay. After all, Prime Minister Papandreou, his finance minister, the whole Greek establishment, had only managed to get parliament to approve the first bailout by repeatedly asserting that it would save Greece’s bacon, that debt restructuring was neither necessary nor desirable, and that anyone who said otherwise deserved to be tarred and feathered – or at least ostracized in the ancient Athenian way. Less than two years later, how could that same government push through the same exhausted and humiliated parliament debt restructuring plus a loan even larger than the first? They were doomed.

 

[Meathead]

Maybe among these misfortunes there are low Greece economy's productivity and corruption?

Actually, it was Greece's bloated pubic sector and low retirement age of usually late 50s depending on the profession and number of children for women.

 

[basquebromance]

In many countries the tax office (HMRC in Britain, the IRS in the United States) is independent of the Ministry of Finance or Treasury but answerable directly to the legislature. In Bailoutistan 2.0 (Greece) the tax and customs office would be answerable to neither

 

[ESay]

Actually, it was Greece's bloated pubic sector and low retirement age of usually late 50s depending on the profession and number of children for women.

I read an article at the times of Greece's financial crisis that was talking about businesses located on some main street of Athens. It was mostly high-end private clinics, lawers offices and the like.

The main point of the article was that every one of those businesses paid taxes that barely exceeded monthly rent payments there. I don't remember details, much time passed since then.

The Greece's economy was doomed to fail. And it was thanks to the EU in landed relatively softly.

 

[Meathead]

I read an article at the times of Greece's financial crisis that was talking about businesses located on some main street of Athens. It was mostly high-end private clinics, lawers offices and the like.

The main point of the article was that every one of those businesses paid taxes that barely exceeded monthly rent payments there. I don't remember details, much time passed since then.

The Greece's economy was doomed to fail. And it was thanks to the EU in landed relatively softly.

I have no idea what is so hard to understand. Greece went into debt with the Euro over which they had no control over. They borrowed liberally because of the Euro to support the welfare state they had created.

The chickens came home to roost, which they invariably do.

Varouroufakis and the idiot OP cannot grasp that.