^^^^
So im not the only one who thought that wasnt even a little ironic.

a little would be putting it mildly. that was a hilarious blunder by Mr. Adios.

No, but it does mean that in at least some instances in the past it has been done and done to good effect and suggests that we can look at individual cases. Now Germany is back on top calling in all markers on time like they never were thrown a few billion bones.

It suggests that austerity and fiscal stringency are not an absolute values.

Cite? That seems like an exotic opinion.

How many times the funds from the Marshall plan do you want Greece to receive?
" Greece has received or been promised $575 billion through assistance efforts, including Target credit, E.C.B. bond purchases and a haircut after a debt moratorium. Compare this with the Marshall Plan, for which Germany is very grateful. It received 0.5 percent of its G.D.P. for four years, or 2 percent in total. Applied to the Greek G.D.P., this would be about $5 billion today.

In other words, Greece has received a staggering 115 Marshall plans, 29 from Germany alone, and yet the situation has not improved"


http://mobile.nytimes.com/2012/06/13...ro-crisis.html

What are the interest rates Greece has to pay anyway ? That may well be part of the problem.

The situation has improved has it not?

http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/krug...cks/?referrer=

The difference is that 50% of German debt was written off (not including debts like the Greek loan that was never paid, about 14bn todays value not counting interest)
Payments were made only when they were running a trade surplus
Repayments were also limited to 3% of export earnings.
Basically they were asked to pay only when they could afford to do so.

Additionally, Greece has received about 250bn, not 575bn. Most of those money (about 90%) went to payoff private lenders like banks. Now most of Greece's debt is owned by the public sector while it used to be the other way around. Basically, Greece's bailout was in large part a bailout of Greece's private debt holders.

The troika insists on the austerity plan. The results after about 5 years are unemployment rates of more than 25%, GDP reduction of about 30%, debt to GDP rose from 112.9% (2009) to 174.9% (2014), youth unemployment rate rose to over 50%.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/30/op...test.html?_r=0

Krugman has some interesting things to say.

Kevin Drum sums up Paul Krugman:

and Daniel Davies:

It seems like Greece's debt isn't ever going to be paid off in full (Krugman calls it a "meaningless" number), so the argument is about who has to make sacrifices. Greece's creditors want the Greek people to make the maximum sacrifice. The Greek people don't want this.

Krugman spins a scenario of economic retaliation that would be bombless warfare if Greece insists on debt relief or tries to leave the Euro. He wonders whether the EU and the ECB have the will to go along with such a nuclear option. If Krugman is correct, can things get bad enough that Greece finds risking such retaliation tolerable compared to enduring depression-prolonging austerity measures?

Since when do elections reflect the will of the people? Almost always in the advanced world none of the above wins a resounding plurality.

This is correct. The country in the world where the average annual hours worked is lowest is of course Germany, home of the lazy good for nothing Prussians. People in the Mediterranean countries all work longer hours and more days a year than do people in the holiday taking beer drinking anglo-saxon countries. The Germans are just drowning in public holidays. They are even worse than the French. Just lie around sunbathing nude in parks all day long.

I mean, none of the above isnt a choice in a lot of places. Not sure Greece counts as 'the advanced world'.

And how much do pensions etc actually benefit from this in comparison to how much banks make from transaction fees? What goes on in the financial markets does nothing for productivity, yet the banking class extract vast quantities of cash from it.

I have no idea what the ratio is, but pensions definitely benefit. And I don't know what you mean by 'doing nothing for productivity' but I'm pretty sure that's wrong.

If you shop around, you can get index rates of 0.01% on index holdings, alongside paltform fees often capped at as low as £15 a year depending on your fund size. Here's a breakdown of the rates in the UK vs fund size.

Banks earnings are utterly trivial vs the size of global pension holdings. Here's a rough breakdown of size of assets in global management. Pensions and mutual funds are over 10x the size of total global sovereign wealth funds. Hedge funds even less.

Even if the entire of the major UK banks took all their profit from the 2trn of UK pension funds alone, and those funds didn't grow at all, it would still take them somewhere between fifty and a hundred and fifty years to clear them out, and that's with literally the most farcical assumptions possible.

Europe’s Debt Crisis: No Relief on the Horizon

“The economic and employment outlook is bleak.” - European Commission

No amount of cutting seemed to be enough. Businesses continued to fail at a rapid pace. Even many of those Europeans who thought they were safe lost their jobs. Those who had work saw their salaries reduced. Parents watched their children fly off to other countries looking for employment — or welcomed them back into their childhood rooms because they were losing their homes to foreclosure.

But the important thing is: We're still together. ... LOL

I forget what cornucopian said it (oh, wait, all of them...), but I think it went something like:

"Well, if this is peak oil, big deal!" ... Cool story, bro

But can Greece make the derail run on time?

Hey Guys, Jiggs totally doesn't bring peak oil up in random threads.

There's absolutely nothing random about it, deep thinker ... The world's decades-long decline in net energy is entirely the reason unsustainable levels of debt (and accounting tricks, food production, etc.) has become a crisis. ... This is well-documented.

Seriously, wtf else would you diagnose as the cause of the world's growing unsustainability the past 10-15 years? Try not to confuse symptom with disease, like most everyone else here.

You're ignoring the wrecking force that is globalization.

I'll take a moment to plug one of my new favorite books under 200 pages, very engaging, you'd love it, Jiggs - Paul Craig Roberts' The Failure of Laissez-Faire Capitalism and the Economic Dissolution of the West. Extremely relevant to this here thread and you can Kindle it for under $10.

So basically you're saying the ridiculously excessive remuneration for doing **** all except buy and sell paper in rigged markets is all good?

And what's utterly trivial about the banks pretty much having a free reign to do what they want without the risk of failure while the fat ****s taking share options (rigged of course) and huge bonuses rake in the benefits?

this is kind of getting off the topic tho, but still...

No way, man, everything you're saying is spot on. It's the fact that people can somehow keep these things out of their analysis that's so omg wtf. It's like the bailouts and the (engineered with malice aforethought) bubble never happened.

"So, we're crooks and we're broke. Instead of that fact *hurting* us, we're just going to go ahead and use this to assert ourselves as an alternative source of governance superior to nation-states. Greece, Italy, you don't like it? We're appointing your overlords."

It's coming here too - it already has in Michigan with their openly fascistic system of 'Emergency Managers.'