Game Of Thrones Reference. When all these top people play the game of thrones all of us suffer

 

Greece stopped printing their own money and joined the economic power house of germany. Manufactures flooded into Greece.

euro made Greece rich for awhile but then their government made terrible choices.

Government took their tax money to building infrastructure.

They had to borrow on top of what they were bringing in and they imported all of the assets for the railways.

They are still paying interest on the Greece olympic building.

Germans have not seen an increase in living standard in more than 15 years.

The London Agreement on German External Debts, also known as the London Debt Agreement (German: Londoner Schuldenabkommen), was a debt relief (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt_relief) treaty between the Federal Republic of Germany (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Germany) and creditor nations. It was concluded in London during negotiations which lasted from February 27 to August 8, 1953. Germany was forgiven 50%
How is this their fault?

The Greek government was a corrupt oligarchy. It was exactly the sort of government that shouldn't have been expected to enter the Eurozone, where governments had to follow rules that were essentially a central banker's wet dream of "responsible" behavior (this being when central bankers thought there would never be a depression again, so "responsibility" excluded any possibility of spending your way out of one).

But Greece joined the Euro anyway, basically faking the whole responsibility thing. Some of this faking was well done, but a lot of it was pretty transparent. Anyone who lent to Greece should have known that the Greek government was a bad risk and demanded high interest. But for a while Greece was borrowing at almost the same interest rate as Germany (which actually is responsible, to a fault), which was just nuts.

When things went south after the financial crash, everyone suddenly saw how stupid those loans had been. Or, if you're Eurozone central bankers, how improvident and inept Greece had been.

Really both are true, but the central bankers, rather than acknowledging that the crash itself--which, remember, they'd said was impossible--showed that they also didn't know what they were doing, decided to "bail out" Greece--which is to say, trade good money to Greece's creditors in exchange for Greece's bad debt.

In exchange even for this help, Greece had to impose austerity. In other words, although it takes two to make a bad loan, the Greeks were expected to bear pretty much all the pain while the banks got their money back.

But while austerity makes sense for a household--if you're in debt, cut your spending, because duh--it doesn't make sense for a country. When a government cuts its spending, that spending is income for other people, that income becomes tax revenue, and so on. So if you cut spending, you cut the national income, and there's less economy to pay back the debt from. So although the Greek government spends less than it used to, it spends more as a % of the shrunken Greek GDP.

Leading to a new crisis, more bailouts, more austerity, and so on.

That's been the pattern since. The "no" vote was the Greek people saying, enough of this bullshit.

Awesome! Thank you.

So the average person in Greece is not responsible for their piss poor government in the same way the US and the industrial military complex?

This looks terribly familiar to the US lol. yikes. I wonder if we will be talked about the same way as the Greeks. how come we are not handling these situations like Iceland and putting these corrupt people in prison?

 

 

The Greek government proposed to hold a referendum - a form of direct democracy in which the people vote not to elect a representative, but instead to demonstrate support for or opposition to a particular idea.