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Originally Posted by Damien
It's just winding me up now. The Eurozone seem to be demand unrealistically punitive conditions on a deal. A 1% surplus? It's clearly ridiculous. Cut them more slack with their repayments and the debt but insist that they institute real reforms. It's clear Greece won't be able to pay them back any time soon so it's better to try and force them into actions that will stabilise the country until such time repayment looks more promising.
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Couldn't really make it up, could you? As part of the conditions to keep the Greek economy going they want a string of privatisations and measures that will cripple its already non-existent ability to sustain its debt burden.
It looks less like an attempt to actually resolve the issue and more like an attempt to asset strip a country. I appreciate that Germany has been prospering at the expense of Greece, et al, for a while but this is just a little too obvious.
The bailouts, and the new cash, are nothing to do with the welfare of Greece. They are purely about shifting bad debt from the balance sheets of private banks to those of EU and Eurozone taxpayers.
The EU's horrific corporatism shines through here. Brown reduced our ability to oppose this corporatism via the Lisbon Treaty, the Lib Dems naively think a 9% voting share can oppose it, Labour want in at any cost, and the party line from the Conservatives is to treat the EU membership referendum as a purely political exercise to score points.
Not that surprising given they seem to treat most things as political, rather than practical, exercises, and are cut from the same corporatist cloth as the EU with only the methods of forwarding corporatism being different.
---------- Post added at 15:54 ---------- Previous post was at 15:49 ----------
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Originally Posted by nashville
Not too sure about some politics but I think we are better off outside the euro.
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Without question. Our economy would've been an even bigger mess had we been in the Euro.
The Euro is a currency largely by Germany, for Germany, and sod the rest of the Eurozone.
---------- Post added at 15:57 ---------- Previous post was at 15:54 ----------
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kursk
Why are we standing by whilst Greece is humiliated? Why don't all EU Countries re-direct their foreign aid handouts to Greece? Yes, Greece needs to help itself but it needs a helping hand. Another one.
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Well, it needs a helping hand rather than being loaded with debt to pay off Eurozone banks who lent it money in the past so that they don't have to suffer the consequences of the bad loans they made.
The Greek bailouts have been nothing of the sort. They have been Greek creditor bailouts. A small fraction of the money has actually gone to Greece.
Moral hazard for the banks completely gone. They can lend however they like knowing the taxpayer will pick up the tab, so they can continue to act like asshats, pay themselves huge bonuses based on the dodgy loans, and pass the bill when it goes bad to taxpayers. A great deal indeed.