Quote:
Originally Posted by nomadking
How did the Germans get the Greeks to go on a spending spree, hide excessive government spending, not pay taxes and, pay certain groups(eg railway workers) excessive wages? How did they get the Irish and the Spanish to overdo building projects? That would be a good trick. Nobody forced them into borrowing too much.
|
They did it by pressuring the ECB to run monetary policy to suit the German economy rather than the Eurozone as a whole. Places like Greece, Portugal and Ireland have never had access to credit at the sort of rates that entailed - cheap credit leads to a credit boom as surely as day follows night, especially when that cheap credit is cheaper than anything you have had before.
The calamity in these countries may well be a by-product of German demands rather than the intent, but they share a heavy chunk of culpability.