And just now probably feeling reasonably happy about this.
I think they’ve been rolling around naked on a bed of oil and herring for the last 40 years to be honest!
This is a good article on the German perspective from March:
If Europe wants a common currency, I don’t see how it can truly work well without some kind of Anglo-American style central bank governance and monetary system. What they have now is akin to tasking the people and government of Texas with solving a problem in Oregon. There’s just too many conflicts of interest.
That’s certainly worked out well recently!
Uh, I think there may be some help for the Greeks available, if they only knew to ask.
I just got this e-mail:
Someone, tell Mrs. Paul to donate all that money to Greece.
They probably will.
What you don’t seem to grasp is that it’s BEEN really bad there for years. Greek unemployment is at levels that the US hasn’t seen since the Great Depression era, and the contraction of the Greek economy has been brutal on the average Greek citizen. They are scared and desperate and, like seemingly most people in Greece and out of Greece as well they don’t really understand the situation very well. They just know that before 2008 they were pretty prosperous and had a very nice stable economy (from their perspective), solid social services and a pretty good life. And today they have none of those things and are barely scraping by.
I have a lot of sympathy for the Greeks, personally, especially the ordinary citizens who don’t really understand why all of this has happened to them. I also don’t have perfect sympathy for the EZ/EU, Germany or the ECB. The situation is pretty complex, and there is plenty of blame to go around…and not all of it is on the Greeks or their idiotic former (or current) governments either.
Personally, I hope some sort of compromise is reached, and so should you, frankly. Even if you don’t have the common decency to understand that real people are being hurt by all of this, many of which don’t even know why or what is happening to them, just from a practical perspective you should understand that Greece going off a cliff is totally uncharted territory, and that it’s possible they won’t go down alone, or that in going down they won’t change or shift a lot of things in much worse ways.
They HAVE suffered…a hell of a lot. And it’s been pretty needless, since in all their suffering they are STILL at this dire straights and looking at the abyss. And, whether they voted ‘yes’ or ‘no’, that fundamental truth wouldn’t have changed. Like I said, they are grasping at anything at this point and are desperate. In addition, their (idiotic to me) government really does believe that this is the only way for Greece to have a stronger position at the negotiating table. And they may actually be right, though they are playing chicken with their nation and economy and I think the cards they think are up their sleeves (Russia most likely) aren’t all low value face cards, not aces. But they really don’t have a lot of options, and anything they do or don’t do is going to make little difference to the suffering of their people in the short or medium term.
It kind of is a huge problem for Mississippi, which is likely going to have a crappy economy for quite a while.
What it’s not is a huge problem for America as a whole, for a variety of reasons. A shared culture and language makes it much easier for people in places with crappy economies to move to places with better ones, rather than continuing to live under a crappy economy and getting increasingly bitter about it. We’ve got nationalism working for the union, rather than against. We tend to think of ourselves as American first, and residents of our individual state second or not at all. Plenty of people would move to another state as easily as moving to another city, or to another neighborhood. We’ve got actual redistributionist policies that send money from states with good economies to states with bad ones. There’s some political posturing about this, but no one really thinks it’s going to drive the country apart. And our political sentiments are better aligned with reality. The poorer states tend to be rural states, whose residents seem to prefer smaller state governments and fewer services. If Mississippi were trying to pay state government employees $100k a year and let them retire at 55 they’d be in more of a pickle.
OK, I exaggerated. The Coop in Vala has an actual fish section (the prepackaged section only has salmon, naked or with stuff on it), but the local ICA only has prepackageds (90% of it salmon, I caught a package of flatfish last weekend but of course it was all fileted and stuff). The supermarket in Tyringe, prepackageds again, but hey, at least they are different from the ones in the ICA.
Prepackageds aren’t fresh fish… I want fish that looks like a fish. pouts
I stand corrected, but neither humbled or interested. I think readers got my point.
Paul Krugman opines, New York TImes, July 5, 2015.
TL;DR: They’re in deep shit, no matter how they voted. Telling all the creditors to go take a hike probably means they’re on the way out of the Euro, but at least offers them a glimpse of a possible light at the end of the tunnel, which may still be years away after much tribulation. The alternative would have been to be stuck in the austerity hell they are in, indefinitely. He suggests that dropping out of the Euro is probably the least awful option they have.
(bolding mine) I assume you realize how that could be seen as bad portent by those who speak English?
Is there some compelling reason why the Greeks can’t collect taxes?
AIUI, “Collect Taxes” was one of the earliest “Austerity” requirements. Instead, they raised public employee salaries and lowered retirement age.
The PM made it a point to go to Russia - and came back with nothing, not even a T shirt.
Maybe they can offer China one of their islands for a naval base - that just might pay their bills.
So… after they go back to the drachma (or whatever) and devaluation happens, Greece is going to be the cheapest vacation spot in Europe. That could be a boost to the tourism industry? Am I way off base?
I assume you know Bologna has the oldest university in the world ?
1088 AD and still going.
And the dope fights ignorance so I think the readers got my point too.
The concept of a European country not being in the EU or using the Euro is relevant to the discussion. Norway does neither, Switzerland does neither.
10 E.U. countries don’t use the euro and I would have corrected that as well.
I think in a discussion about what happens to Greece, such points of fact matter.
Not at all. There is no reason why Greece’s economy couldn’t be buoyed up by a combination of a huge push for their tourism industry (they are not short on beautiful locations, good food and historical interest) and better management of their finances. However, tied to the euro they are not in much of a position to make themselves a financially attractive location.
A switch to the drachma and a write-off of much of the debt whilst remaining under the umbrella of the E.U. is probably their best bet.
I may be mis-remembering the long ago elements of my degree related to economics but, whilst what would effectively be, a devaluation may well help tourism for Greece (and shouldn’t be sniffed at - any money will help), don’t J-Curve assumptions imply inward investment (labour becomes cheaper, so Greece could become more attractive as a site for factories, etc) as well as helping their export pricing? The effects are thus, hopefully for the Greeks, much broader than would be the case if it were just a case of getting people to go to Greece for their holidays.
They obviously need restructuring of revenue collection as well - but the key thing is broadening the tax base to start with by getting people into work - then taking their money to help pay off debts that are owed (assuming they remain - a write off still may happen).
A massive diversion from the OP but …
Swedish supermarkets can be weird. Even here in Stockholm there is a mix of smaller ones that, to me as a Brit, seem like little more than convenience stores and larger ones that seem more like what I am used to. In the suburb I live in I have an ICA, COOP and Hemköp, but only the Hemköp sells fresh fish. It is the bigger of the three, but is a bit further from everyone’s home, which seems to be the general (although not fixed) rule for the larger ones.
Often these smaller ones will be named as an ICA/COOP Nära.
Personally, I don’t think anyone…economists in particular…know exactly what the effects are likely to be from any course of action. The 2008 crash (and others before it) showed just how misguided learned economists can be and how little predictive power their models have and/or how little people trust their judgements.
I think simple is better here for Greece. Grow your economy (with tourism being the prime candidate), improve your tax-take, live within your means and see if you can get away with not paying your debts to your creditors.
One minor peeve I have about the whole thing is the constant extension of supposed hard deadlines. I’ve been following this fairly closely, and again and again there are reports and comments from experts proclaiming that unless an agreement is reached by such-and-such date, then such-and-such will happen which will trigger a Grexit. And then the date comes and nothing happens, other than a focus on some new date at which something must happen or it will really really trigger a Grexit. And the missed IMF payment, and then the referendum, and then the need for a concrete proposal by the emergency EU meeting today, and so on and so on.
The upshot of it all is that it seems like a pretty strong signal that there is a very very strong reluctance to let the Greeks leave, which seems to me to play to the Greeks’ favor. (They, by contrast, seem content to keep calling the EU’s bluff.)