When you say that Germany throws Greece under the bus, you say exactly that.
Lets clarify then.
There is long-term blame, and there is the here-and-now blame.
For the long-term stuff, Germany is definitely among the elite who I argue are to blame, but they are BY NO MEANS alone.
In the here-and-now, all of the European finance ministers seem to have decided to defer to Germany on this, so, despite not having the constitutional authority to run the negotiations, they have ended up de-facto in charge. As such, they are the ones calling the shots, and they are the ones actively throwing Greece under the bus, while all the other finance ministers are passively throwing Greece under the bus.
Or maybe the idea that the ratio to the GDP would be the ultimate factor is just fiction... It is like measuring temperature on a scale which changes size depending on air pressure. It might be an indicator but it is not comparable.
That is how debt is measured because it tells you something MUCH more important than a flat figure, it tells you how much you owe compared to your income.
You can't compare indebtedness by the headline number because for Germany to be indebted by a few trillion Euro is no real burden on them, but for little Luxembourg that same debt would be catastrophic!
debt-to-GDP is the debt equivalent of reporting diseases per 100,000 of population. It turns the a meaningless number into a rate, allowing comparisons which are impossible with a flat number.
What is fact is: they borrowed money they would not have borrowed, had the interest rates been as high as before getting the Euro. That could make one think, especially in the light that those interest rates were not based on any mechanism implemented in the union but simply the belief that someone would pay at the end.
Those rates were based on the beliefs of humans who make guesses sitting behind computer screens. I'm not seeing the relevance of something so arbitrary.
Or do you think accepting the low interest rates without any changes in the national economy was a reasonable and responsible behavior?
The Greeks were no more or less responsible than the Italians. The figures clearly show it. They are as corrupt as each other, and the Greeks were a little LESS indebted than the Itialians in the lead up to the crisis.
Greece are not exceptional, it is the flaws of the Euro combined with the deeply flawed initial response to the crisis that turned and unremarkable minor problem into a catastrophe.
The magnitude of the outcome is disproportionate to the input because of the mistakes made by the Euro elite over the decade leading up to the ciris, and the troika during the crisis.
They started under different conditions and grew with their currency. And let's not forget: they had a civil war to get there. Compared to that Europe still does rather well.
What relevance is any of that?
They have been more successful than us at running a single currency over a large and varied geographic area, we need to learn from them so we can make Europe better than it is!
All those things are not quite as simple. First of all: the negotiations where in the last century and therefore based on national interests. The EU did not do too well concerning democratization.
If there was some kind of badge on GH for pefect comedic under-statement, you sir, would have double-earned it!
So any institution without responsibility to the EU paliament would act in someone's interest, just like it is now.
Eurobonds would have needed a different foundation which would have meant the nations being responsible for paying them back if things go south would have had to establish safety measures which would have stopped Greece from borrowing and would have forced it to modernize, with all the quarrels resulting from that.
I doubt anybody would have agreed to a concept which seems reasonable with the experience of now about which measures work and which don't and of course the knowledge that a currency union will always mean that the stronger partners will get the bill for the failures of the weaker partners and therefore have to control them more thoroughly. But those experiences could just be aquired by starting somewhere. So a more realistic task would have been to start with a system which involves fewer different opinions and leaves out the smaller nations until a balance of interests can be established via a democratic EU.
The milk is spilled. It didn't HAVE to be spilled, but it was, and you do a good job rationalising why it got spilled.
IMO what matters now is our response to the reality we find ourselves in. We now know more than we did. We know the Euro as-is is very vulnerable to asymmetric shocks, and we know that inflationary austerity is a fiction.
The correct response would be to start by giving Greece a realistic way out of the mess they are now in that has at the very least been massively inflated by past bad decisions, if not actually caused by them.
Once that is done, the discussion needs to immediately move on to making the Euro more robust going forwards.
I'm not seeing our finance ministers thinking like that. I'm seeing every attempt being made to divert all blame to the Greeks in order to deflect all calls for reform. If we say the Greeks are 100% to blame, we won't have to do the hard work of reforming the Euro!
The recent moves of the Greek government did not encourage more investments in that light.
I don't agree. It's the recent moves by the powerful nations in Europe, and especially the Germans that I find rotten in the current light.
B.
ented with according statements of 'experts' and the problem with experts is that you always find one confirming your point of view. so it'sonly the 'quality' of those experts that makes the difference !
