Thanks for that “Greek crisis … in 2 minutes”.
It’s not like we haven’t been engaged with it since at least the Spring of 2012.
Thank you for the link. I feel smarter already. 
Didn’t click the link, I take it. 
But, as always, you are welcome…glad I could help. 
I’m not sure what you mean by “defraud”. In American terms, or Anglo-American terms, it means at the time you signed the contract you intended not to perform. If at the time you took out a loan, you intended to pay it back, you haven’t defrauded anybody, in legal terms.
For example, Trump has declared bankruptcy I don’t know how may times - which means he didn’t pay back his creditors. But he didn’t defraud anybody, unless he intended not to pay them back when he took out the loan.
Failing to pay back creditors, in and of itself, is not a crime. It’s a civil matter.
I didn’t know the bit about Franco-German relations, so thanks for that info.
It is a crime if the Greek government cooked its books. From what I understand the Greek Govt did hide the full extent of it’s financial woes when it borrowed much of this money. Depending upon the extent of this sleight of hand a crime may have been committed.
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I’m not sure what you mean by “defraud”. In American terms, or Anglo-American terms, it means at the time you signed the contract you intended not to perform. If at the time you took out a loan, you intended to pay it back, you haven’t defrauded anybody, in legal terms.
[/QUOTE]
Well, that’s the rub though, isn’t it? I mean, why didn’t the Greek governments (it wasn’t just one) know they couldn’t pay back the debt? I mean, they knew they were borrowing a LOT of money…much more than their economy could possibly ever pay back (and they kind of knew this was a bad thing, which is why they took pains to hide it and to cook their books so folks wouldn’t see what was going on). And they knew they were spending it on basically popular programs to make folks happy and content, not things designed to hyperdrive their economy. You aren’t going to get your economy into high gear by offering more and more generous pensions at lower and lower ages after all…at least not in the real world. So, I think ‘defraud’ is EXACTLY the right term to use in this case. The Greek governments in the past knew that eventually the jig would be up and someone would have to face the music…they just figured it would be someone else and not them and that if they just kept kicking the can down the road it would be someone other than them that had to deal with the mess.
I don’t think this is a perfect analogy, since I think Trump THOUGHT he’d be able to pay back his debts easily. He kept getting new loans because the folks who were loaning him the money thought they’d get it back as well. In the case of the Greeks, they got more loans because there was an expectation that the EU (and, not to put to fine a point on it, Germany) would stand behind the Greeks and assure their loans…which they did until this mess all exploded.
I believe it IS a crime to defraud people, but yeah…no one is going to lock up the Greek nation (or even former or current government officials) for doing what they did. It’s certainly a ‘civil matter’. I’m sure that makes it all better. Good luck having them get a loan in the future (unlike Trump :p). But then, according to you, they don’t need any stinking loans from those greedy investors or Germans or whatever…salvation is at hand! All they have to do is dump their debt, create their own currency and next thing you know they will be in baklava and ouzo! The promised land is at hand for the Greek people, no doubt about it.
I’d also recommend reading some history. The US, for example, increased the monetary base (also sometimes called “high-powered” money") over the last several years by about $3 trillion dollars. It went from a little over $800 billion to about $4 trillion, an increase of 500%.
The result was a decrease in unemployment, from 10% to about 5.5%, combined with historically low inflation. Most recently, the annual inflation rate was 0%.
Of course, Greece is a different country. The overall unemployment rate there is 25%. Not 10%, or 5.5%. Unemployment there is a much bigger problem. Employing people creates goods and services. Since inflation is a function of supply and demand, increasing both the amount of stuff for sale, and the purchasing power of people, does not necessarily lead to inflation. However, even if it did, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. If people are in debt, for example, reducing the burden of that debt is good for them, and it’s good for the economy as a whole: if people have less debt, it means they can spend less money servicing that debt, which means they can spend more money buying goods and services. Since purchasing goods and services creates a demand for goods and services, it means employing more people.
Since a nation’s wealth is a function of the productivity of its people, and the number of people working, employing more people leads to more (overall) wealth.
Now some people will not necessarily be better off. If someone’s income is derived from interest paid by others, and the real value of those interest payments decrease, they’ll be worse off. But Greece should pursue policies that help Greece as a whole, not policies that help the small minority who make a living off the debt of others.
It is way past time for Greece to send grown-ups to deal with their fiscal crises. The current “Give us more money or we’ll hold our breaths and die - THEN you’ll be sorry!” children are incapable of honest and honorable conduct.
If they want to run a country where rhe rich pay no taxes, the middle class pays no taxes, and the poor pay no taxes, while generation after generation cycle through “work for 10 years, then retire at full benefits” (or whatever the hell game they play), fine - but don’t expect the rest of Europe to pay the bills.
And yes, the PM (infant-in-charge) did run off to Moscow to be photographed with Putin when the nasty Troika refused to pay his bills.
I noticed that there was no news release about Russia being ready to pay Greece’s bills.
Maybe he could hit up the North Koreans?
LOL, if there is ONE thing that will finally get people in Russia up in arms against Putin, it would be him giving Russian money to Greece to support their average $1,000/month pensions while in Russia they average $150/month.
Except that description has precisely no bearing on the actual situation.
Seriously, which tabloid did you pick that up from?
I thought the whole deal was that Greeks try to avoid paying taxes, and they are hence welching on their very large debt. 
The starting point is lenders kept lending when the risk became too great. Why would lenders behave irrationally?
They want to make money, and think that Greece staying afloat is worth someone bailing them out.
Should have watched that video I linked too. Short answer is that Greece was in the EZ, giving them the backing of all of Europe (and Germany in particular). They gained a better credit score, so to speak, simply by being in the club. It didn’t hurt that they cooked the books as well to make them look better (both before they joined the EZ/EU and after). The lenders weren’t behaving irrationally at all. You simply have to be able to see how the situation was before 2008 when it all came apart.
Seriously, watch the video…it’s basically the European Debt Crisis Visualized and worth the 12 minutes IMHO. I’m sure it’s not definitive and I’m sure some of the more economics oriented 'dopers could find lots wrong with it, but it’s still a good basic video on how the mess happened and how Europe got where they are.
Here is the CIA (yes, that one) Factbook on Greece:
click “Economy” for a brief summary of who, what, when, and how much.
No “Why” beyond the obvious of cooking books to get more money.
There’s some kind of big tax exemption on shipping income, and I think VATs are low or non-existent on some of the remote islands, and the rich engage in tax avoidance as in much of Europe. But I think the inability to collect tax has been exaggerated.
Greece has even been running surpluses for several years now. The problem is that they have so much debt, and such obnoxious creditors (that want to dictate austerity policies rather than progressive taxation), not that they can’t raise tax.
I have no confidence in my ability to explain economics to you. Thus I will only point out that the suggestion was to inflate the currency to eliminate debt, and that the US national debt more than doubled during the period you mention. So increasing the money supply did not do for the US what you think it would do for Greece.
It is indeed, and that’s why your previous example is other than illustrative.
Inflation reduces purchasing power. Do you at least understand that? And inflating the currency does not increase the amount of stuff for sale. At least tell us that you understand that.
Apparently not.
Inflating the currency does not free up purchasing power; it reduces it.
I will take a shot at explaining this to you, and if/when it doesn’t help, leave it to someone else if they feel moved to help.
I owe you a debt. I am obligated to pay you $100 a month to service that debt. My monthly income is $200. So I spend $100 a month on debt payments, and $100 a month on food and rent. But I can’t afford to spend half my income on debt. So I rub my Magic Economics Genie Lamp, and he grants me a wish.
Now we inflate the currency, so that $1 buys as much as $100 used to do. I now pay you $100 a month to service the debt. (It’s only worth a dollar, but that doesn’t matter to me.) Great - now I have the same $100 a month left over to buy food and rent. Unfortunately, my leftover $100 is only worth a dollar, so I can only buy a dollar’s worth of food and rent, and that does matter to me.
So I have to rub the Magic Genie Lamp again, and get another wish. So everyone’s salary is increased by a hundred times (in nominal dollars). Great - now the debt is still only a dollar a month in constant dollars, so I can cover that with a nominal payment of $100 (worth one constant dollar) and still have all that money left over. Unfortunately, everyone else who uses the currency is in the same boat. They can’t afford to sell for less than the value of their goods and service in constant dollars. So they jack prices up 100 times to get to the same value as they did before the inflation. And everyone is pretty much back in the same position as before, except for the person to whom I owed the debt. He is bankrupt, since all his debts were repaid in nominal terms that lost almost all their real value.
That’s what happened in Weimar Germany, which is why I posted the link.
Purchasing power is a function of constant currency, not inflated currency. Making a currency worthless to avoid paying a debt makes the currency worthless for purposes other than paying debts as well.
As mentioned, your grasp of economics seems to be one with Ninevah and Tyre, so if this doesn’t sink in, I won’t worry about it too much. But in the interest of fighting ignorance, at least I threw a few punches before seeing that I was beating my fists against a brick wall.
Regards,
Shodan
Do you have a cite for this? My understanding is that they are running a ‘surplus’ if you don’t count payments on debt interest, local government and social security fund budgets.
So, this seems to be the latest:
And, the government still seems to be pushing for a ‘no’ vote, which will mean no bail out from the ECB either (which is on hold until the July 5th referendum vote). Greece seems to be teetering on the edge of the abyss to me and may have already started it’s death spiral. I guess at this point their only hope is if enough of them come to their senses and vote ‘yes’ (which will also have the beneficial effect of causing the current government to resign), at least that’s how it seems to me. Even if people think it would be a good idea for Greece to leave the Euro and go back to their own currency it doesn’t look like they have enough capital to bridge the gap…the Greek people are in a serious capital crunch already, with very stringent limits being places on their ability to withdraw their own money from their own accounts. And it looks to only get worse, to me at least.
ETA: BBC’s take on a ‘no’ vote: