European Politico-economics QA Mega-thread - Page 175

On July 09 2015 00:42 Gorsameth wrote:

Where was Tsipra's respect when he came to the Eurogroup meeting yesterday with nothing?

On July 09 2015 00:58 Hondelul wrote:

News in Germany said it was because there is very little money going around at the moment with the very limited capital Greeks can withdraw. You can't expect the people pay for public transport if they can't get their hand on cash money.
Possible that I got something wrong, but that what I got.

On July 09 2015 01:03 WhiteDog wrote:

It must be untrue, they are just rich and they profit from european money.

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras called in a speech to the European Parliament on Wednesday for a fair deal to keep his country in the euro zone, acknowledging Greece's own responsibility for its plight, after EU leaders gave him five days to come up with convincing reforms.

The Greek government formally submitted a request for a three-year loan from the European Stability Mechanism bailout fund that would be used "to meet Greece's debt obligations and to ensure stability of the financial system".

With its banks closed, cash withdrawals rationed and the economy in freefall, Greece has never been closer to a state bankruptcy that would probably force it to print an alternative currency and leave the euro.

Yet the leftist premier seemed relaxed and confident, with a note of humility, when he appeared before EU lawmakers in Strasbourg to cheers and scattered boos.

Speaking hours after euro zone leaders, at another emergency summit in Brussels, set Greece a deadline of the end of the week to come up with far-reaching reform proposals, Tsipras said Greeks had no choice but to demand a way out of "this impasse".

"We are determined not to have a clash with Europe but to tackle head on the establishment in our own country and to change the mindset which will take us and the euro zone down," he said to applause from the left.

He promised to deliver detailed reform proposals on Thursday and mostly avoided the angry rhetoric that has alienated many European partners, although he criticized attempts to "terrorize" Greeks into voting for "never-ending austerity".

In its loan application letter, Athens promised to implement a set of tax and pension measures "as early as the beginning of
next week", promising more details within 48 hours.

Speaking before him, European Council President Donald Tusk repeated that the final deadline for Greece to submit convincing reform plans and start implementing them was this week.

"Our inability to find an agreement may lead to the bankruptcy of Greece and the insolvency of its banking system," Tusk said. "And for sure it will be most painful for the Greek people.

"I have no doubt that this will affect Europe, also in the geopolitical sense. If someone has any illusion that it will not, they are naive," he said.

In the turbulent chamber, some lawmakers held up "Oxi" (No) signs to back Greek voters' rejection of more austerity, while far-right speakers praised the radical leftist government for standing up to what several called the European "oligarchy".

TIMETABLE

If experts from the European Commission, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund deem the Greek proposals viable, euro zone finance ministers would meet on Saturday to recommend opening negotiations with Athens, and a special summit of the 28-nation EU would meet on Sunday to approve an aid plan.

Before then, Greece is supposed to rush a first wave of measures through parliament, euro zone sources said, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said she would ask parliament in Berlin to authorize the opening of loan negotiations provided the Greek measures are deemed satisfactory.

Euro zone sources said one key question is whether the Greek reform package will be more ambitious than the spending cuts, tax increases and modest reforms that Greek voters rejected on Sunday in a referendum on a previous bailout plan.

"The numbers have to add up, and the numbers have become vastly more unfavorable since the banks were shut and the economy seized up in the last 10 days," one euro zone finance official said.

Despite the last-minute efforts to conjure up a deal for Greece, a Reuters poll of economists found the probability of Greece leaving the euro zone had risen to 55 percent from 45 percent last week, the first time it has gone above half-way.

Greece faces 'final deadline'

Greek PM wins commitment to seek last-minute rescue deal
Tsipras acknowledged his radical government's share of responsibility for what had gone wrong in its 5-1/2 months in office but said the bulk of Greece's problems lay in a failed austerity policy imposed over the last 5-1/2 years of crisis.

He admitted that after winning power on a promise to end austerity, he had "spent more time negotiating than governing".

He was also strongly critical of Greece's failings as a society, citing a history of clientelism, corruption, chronic tax evasion that had "run riot", inequality and "the nexus of political and economic power".

While Athens has made strides since 2010 in turning around its public finances to post a budget surplus before debt service, it has lagged on implementing structural reforms.

In particular, it has fallen far short of targets on privatizing state assets and struggled to improve tax collection and reform labor laws and a costly, fragmented pension system.

The IMF in the past has demanded that Greece quickly implement a law allowing for collective dismissals since no such layoffs have been approved for 30 years.

Creditors have also pushed to end anti-competitive restrictions in product markets that have kept prices high, such as preventing the sale of bread in convenience stores.

On July 09 2015 01:19 Faust852 wrote:

Damn you are such an annoying guy.
We fucking get it, you are a extrem leftist, a communist. booooo fuck the richs, fuck the banks, fuck politics, fuck europe !

But well, please stop right now, we got it, everything in the Europe is corrupted, our leaders are evil and only want moar monee. Everything you say is for the sake of trashing the EU and the EZ while totally discrediting how it has helped tremendously every fucking countries in it since its creation.

Yeah, Greece did shit, and we are partly responsible, that's a evidence that anything is perfect. But look other countries, and tell me that after following the authsterity mesures, they aren't on the way to the recovery ?
Yeah, fuck Greece right now because they did nothing, they didn't even try.

how it has helped tremendously every fucking countries in it since its creation

On July 09 2015 01:26 WhiteDog wrote:

You are spouting nonsense. Half of what you imply I said has not been said by anyone in this thread. Just because most of the arguments against Greece are poor doesn't mean you have to get nervous and cry when someone point how weak they are.

And I'm not a communist.


I've never seen proof of that. All I see is people saying it did, but when you look at actual number, some win some lose. But overall the growth / living condition / commercial balance / industrial strength / unemployment, all those indicator are not better than prior to the euro.

That's hypocrisy. I never saw you cry when Germany or France didn't respect the budgetary rules from 2000 to 2010.

Not only the Euro. For thirty years Spain has received billions from the EU (and the CEE before). We have build motorways, hospitals, universities, brought our agrarian sector into the 20th century, and many, many more.
We have grown from a developing nation to a fully first world one. Losing your money hurts, but the truth is that now it's out turn to pay our share to Poland and Romania and Slovenia and so on. Because, even with the worst economic crisis in generations, we can afford it even if it's not as much as we could have five years ago.
Greece has been in the Union longer than us. By now, they should not be getting aid from Eastern Europe, they should be giving it, so in 20 or 30 years those nations are developed enough than the can complain about having to pay money to the EU.

In 2010, as Greece signed a bailout deal with the International Monetary Fund, forecasts by the IMF and the European Commission suggested the country’s debt-to-GDP ratio would peak below 150 percent of gross domestic product in 2012. The forecasts also projected that Greek GDP in 2015 would be 8 percent larger than in 2011. This optimistic vision of the future was based on underlying assumptions that Greece would go from having the lowest productivity growth in the euro zone to among the highest, alongside the highest labor force participation rates and employment rates equal to Germany’s.

No one—including the IMF—believes those assumptions anymore. The latest estimates suggest Greek GDP will be 10 percent smaller than in 2011. Why were those early prognostications so rosy? It turns out that the IMF, the EU, and other institutions have a tradition of consistently overoptimistic growth forecasts in times of crisis. Dealing with that tendency would significantly reduce the harm done by future financial crises.

Debt climbs when economies falter. Using a sample of developing countries, New York University economist Bill Easterly showed in a recent paper that the pace of growth has a strong association with debt levels. He suggested that developing economies that experienced accelerated growth between 1975 and 1994 saw debt-to-GDP ratios increase by 1 percent per annum. Countries that saw growth rates fall, on the other hand, saw debt-to-GDP climb far faster—between 3 percent per annum for those that saw modest slowdowns to 7 percent for those that saw the sharpest declines. In his analysis, he demonstrated how the same pattern applied to countries in the euro zone after the financial crisis.

At the same time, Easterly showed that countries in debt crises are prone to especially optimistic growth forecasts. Just as the IMF and the European Commission have for Greece, the World Bank and IMF drew up growth forecasts for these countries to predict debt sustainability. Easterly found that forecasts for highly indebted poor countries in the 1990s and early 2000s were consistently too positive in their estimates–overpredicting growth by an average of 1 percent a year. IMF researchers agree with him: Hans Gemberg and Andrew Martinez of the fund’s Independent Evaluation Office suggest the organization’s forecasts “tended to be consistently over-optimistic in times of country-specific, regional, and global recessions.”