...no pun intended.

so what does everyone think about Greece's awesome fiscal management and their most recent decision to put their future on the back of a vote in a national referendum?

what's the fallout if Greece ends up rejecting the austerity measures + bailouts and instead just defaults? Will they remain in the Eurozone? Will the ensuing economic shockwave sink the Euro? Will I be able to fly to Germany for $400 CDN eventually?

Essentially, if Greece defaults, nothing will happen. A lot of shouting by CNN and Faux News, Western governments tightening the vice around their civilians "in the interests of national security", and maybe a couple hundred more points off the stock exchanges. Business as usual.

I think martian and pang are trying to switch AT from evo-laf bashing posting, by dangling economical issues in front of us :) and at the same time make me think I'm back to doing business, economy and psychology research :)

MOD CONSPIRACY THEORIES?? OMGZ.

actually no. The evo/laf bashing had died down prior to me posting any of this:P

Just have had more time to read and post stuff as of late:P

ps:

http://xkcd.com/356/

bunch of idiots and llaars (pun intended).

Germany will invade france. That is how all this will end.

I will declare martian law and steal all earth women.
That is all
:P

I like the idea. If they vote pro Euro, then they should quit striking and return to work to get themselves out of the mess that they created by not paying taxes, bribing,....
If they vote against the Euro, well, take your Drachmen and the remaining Euro countries can focus on solving the crisis in the other Euro countries.

If Italy and Spain weren't in a precarious position due to Greece then I think the EU would have just booted Greece. I mean how do you justify to hard-working Germans who are notorious for saving/investing/etc that they should subsidize another country's population that lived well, well, well beyond it's means.

big mistake was made when those who accepted greece to euro believed their word on their loans etc and didn't bother to check that from outside source.

there's a shortage of frog legs in Germany?

Greece would make a nice penal colony for the rest of europe, that would be a great way to repay the debt. And think of all the nuclear waste you could store in greece . . . options abound.

I think Germany has a new way to start taking over Europe... can't make payments.. we'll just start taking some land... here, there.. everywhere, and enjoy making you actually work for once in your life.... (atleast the ones that don't want to work, I'm sure there are some hard workers around... maybe)

You reap what you sow, and if you dont reap enough, there's no beer. Simply yet overlooked fact.

If greece goes under, bond holders will suffer. The people will commence riot. The country will be setback for decades. And the rest of the world ? They'll try to make money out of it.

If Greece defaults it hits French and German banks massively. It will also push countries on the brink into the same problems. Ireland, Portugal and Belgium especially. However the contagan impact on Spain and Italy is the worst scenerio. If these countries need bailing out then Europe will prob need more than the trillion alread agreed (though no detail of how it will be raised). If these two countries fail then banks all over Europe will go under and the whole Eurozone would go into a depression and the Euro currecy would go the way the Gold Standard did. Anyone who trades with Europe (pretty much everyone) would affected and it would be much worse than 2008.

The deal agreed last week was supposed to be stage one of a crazy huge solution, but within 5 days its fallen apart because Greece decided to hold a referendum out of the blue without even hinting about it during the dicussions.

Well we know how those lazy ass tards are gonna vote...The world economy is doomed! DOOMED!~

I dont think the Greek government will even survive the vote o confidence this week.

Sounds like what happened in Argentina. The country defaulted, the government resigned. It took them a while to find anyone willing to take over after that.

The German banks will survive, but some of France's big boys like Society Generale are leveraged 50-55:1 with heavy sovereign debt loads. There is no way SG survives it if Greek defaults.

And your broader point right. The big problem is all the other people tied to Greece.

If it were not for the poor southern European countries obligated to purchase more expensive products from within the community, Germans would have nothing to save.

The northern European countries made extremely poor business judgments by lending money to the very corrupt and incompetent Greek political elite. The responsibility does not lie on the backs of the Greek people. The austerity measures would certainly ensure that Greece would not recover anytime soon.

Unlike some foolish North American Country, the Greeks have the courage to stand-up for themselves, and refuse to blindly chase the carrot!

Aren't the Greeks the same ones who elected the "very corruption and incomptent...political elite?" So ultimately the responsibility does lie on their backs for their decisions.

And yes, the same can be said of Americans with austerity measures. If you elected people who continually champion living beyond your means then at some point you will pay the price.

Courage is recognizing the problem and taking action, even if it means a paintful few years. Sadly I think my country's politicians aren't much better, they're just in a more transparent position so the party's jostling for power has slowed the rise to the same fate. We still have (doesn't mean we will seize) a chance to fix our problem. Greece is at the end of the line.

trumper: your 1st line is closer to italy than greek.

atm greece's prime minister refuses to resign.

i've defaulted a bit, Citigroup called me up and demanded immediate payment. i told them to go pound sand and that i'd pay them when i was damn good and ready to. how is this any different? is Greece having problems making a payment or are they going to refuse to acknowledge the debt?

Funny you say that, because it was certain company outside Europe that helped Greece to conceil the mess they were in by hiding bad stuff from their balance. And 'strangely' enough they made a nifty profit advising and after that short selling on anything connected to Europe.
It's easy to manipulate numbers but very hard to verify numbers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/...litary_junta_of_1967-1974

Things are linked you know.

they just plain broken links when i'm using my PSP to browse the forums.

martian: don't use your PSP.
Dibs: don't give me broken links.

You realise the alternative for Greece is default and being ejected from the single currency. Fighting for that is not courage, it is stupidity...

Greece already backed down from the refferendum idea.

hmm, if the horse refuses to blindly follow the carrot, then it gets stuck with the glue factory. so, i'm guessing there might be some benefit in following the carrot.

greece spent hundreds of millions to tanks and warships quite recently, tanks from germany and ships from france so those 2 got partially their money back.

who were they planning on invading or defending against?

oh well, this is quite the f..ed up situation here.
I feel the most for the poor new countries to the EU like the czech republic. They have an average income of ~600 euro per month and are supposed to pay, so that the greeks don't have to reduce theirs from 1500.

I can understand that greeks don't want to lower their standard of living, but tbh, you can't not change that, if you're bankrupt. And during the last decades they had quite the nice lives. Here are some numbers that I read in an article:
-average retirement age in greece: 55 for men, 50 for women (in germany it's 65-67)
-average income per year for an employee of the atate-run train-company: 55000 Euro, that's the income for a young engineer in germany
-citizens, who are paying taxes: not 1 more than absolutely have to

here's the article, may take some time to read
http://www.vanityfair.com/...ng-bonds-201010#gotopage1
additionally it's vanity fair, so I'm not 100% sure how true those statements are, but even if they are exaggerated, they still look ridiculous

Even though the majority of Germans supported Hitler, leading to the complete collapse of Germany, it didn't stop the Americans from rebuilding the country. It was the right thing to do to ensure future stability. Greece on the other hand suffered greatly as a very important ally against the Germans, in both WW I & II, though they had to fend for themselves.

Once again, the future of Europe is relying heavily on Greece. Punishing them with the austerity measures is not a reasonable solution to stimulate their economy.

...

I'm going to guess your American judging from that perception of history.

North American, though not American.

Same statement is true if you substitute Americans with whatever suites your perception!

North America is a part of America...

Eh, ain't that the other way round diez?

Btw, those lazy ass greeks had this coming. They were just ignoring the elephant in the room all these years...

Edit: Looks like they cancelled the referendum idea. Lulz.

OOT:
Calling people "American" is just like calling people "Asian", it's a continent.

Back to Greece people! Nevermind me!

North America = continent...

American = anyone from S/America or N/America. Undeniable fact. Don't even try to refute it!

iNouda, that is incorrect at least in vernacular English. Referring to people from the two continents you'd either say North American or South American. Because we are the United States of America we are referred to as Americans because United States of Americans or United Statesians makes no sense.

I thought that greece was already a penal colony

They've been a penal colony ever since the first Athenian dude looked at the first Athenian boy and said "Hmmmmm"...

Yes, I received this lecture in South America before. I would be fine adhering to the shared term American if ANY of them referred to themselves that way, but they don't. Have you met any Ticos, Nicos, Argentines, etc referring to themselves as Americans? Case closed.

Rewarding 'too big too fail' with more largess rarely leads to a behavorial paradigm shift. In fact, I think you can argue safely that it leads to even riskier decision-making in the future. Therefore I don't think the austerity measures as much punitive as they are attempts to shift behaviors. While we're at it, this is one of my biggest misgivings about the handling of TARP in the US--the fact that so many folks were bailed out without suffering any consequence. It's a horrible precedent to set.

The problem with your argument of letting them default is that you'll drag down other local economies and plummet most of the continental shelf (if not all) into a deep recession. Then it's not just one country with austerity measures, it's half of Europe. You will do more damage this way then just forcing the Greeks to make tough changes and the banks to eat up to half the loans they made to Greece, which, by the way, is far more than the deal forced on Uruguay but less than the Argentian route (good story in the Washington Post about this yesterday).

turkey isn't that far.

"Greece on the other hand suffered greatly as a very important ally against the Germans, in both WW I & II, though they had to fend for themselves."

Sort of. Greece has the honor of being the first country directly intervened in post ww2 by the US in order to chase out the "communists". It was also a victim of a CIA backed coup which lead it to having a very oppressive military dictatorship for a period of 7 years (this is not a conspiracy theory, the US openly admitted they helped). A country doesn't easily recover from something like that. see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Civil_War
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/...unta_of_1967%E2%80%931974

Note that this is a similar situation to what happened in various countries in South America and SE Asia with mixed results.