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In Greece, Property Is Debt

nytimes.com

41–50 of 302 posts

Re: In Greece, Property Is Debt

#41
post #10
post #3

The system is fucked beyond repair. There is no 'Greek' system or 'English' system - it's all the same, it's all interconnected - so someone in Europe must live the consequences of political decisions in China or the United States or any other country, really. And that's to be expected, because the system was not 'engineered', but hacked together in time - sometimes in response to crises, sometimes influenced by insa…

I think faults in each country have one thing in common - socialism and excessive bureaucracy that comes with it.

You're the Delenda Carthago guy ?

Re: In Greece, Property Is Debt

#42
post #34

This is what happens when you allow uncontrolled and unregulated asset transfers. There's a reason that pretty much any index/stock in the world freezes when the daily drop exceeds a certain threshold (i.e. Japan, JPX, has a limit of usually ~7% [1]). This prevents panic selling and even though seems like a "delaying-the-inevitable-drop" cop-out, it really does work. Greece Government are stupid as hell for letting e…

Article is bad article.

It does not filter through inheritances that may not be worth the money to pursue.

Re: In Greece, Property Is Debt

#44
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.globalpropertyguide.com/Europe/Greece/Taxes-and-C... It looks like property tax tops out at 2% annually of assessed value. This is similar to tax rates in Wisconsin, but if they play the same games in Greece that some local governments do, the properties are assessed well above anything you could sell the property for.

The government should be obliged to purchase the property for the assessed value then.

[deleted]

Re: In Greece, Property Is Debt

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Decisions for themselves? Hah. It's not in the article, but Schäuble and the other EU finance ministers have set out to make an example out of Greece, or the apparatchiks just don't like the radical lefties that got into power. Paul Krugman has mused, before, EUcrats could tell government officials what to do, and when they follow them, even if the country fails and they get voted out, they'd get cushy EU jobs. But t…

Just so I'm clear, you are claiming that the finance ministers are purposely rigging things so that Greece will fail -- that all those loans and such were part of a plan to make an example out of them. First I've heard of this, but I haven't been following it. It sounds quite far-fetched though. I must be missing something.

I wouldn't go as far as the OP: I think Heinlein's razor comes into effect here. There is a clear solution to the problem, which is debt forgiveness. The troika has known this since the crisis began. The problem is that it's politically untenable. So instead they kick the can down the road, do nothing, and hope everything gets better on its own. They've caused a depression in Greece. They've also turned me into a euroskeptic.

Re: In Greece, Property Is Debt

#46
post #19

Greek economy was a scam. There is really no way to help them now. They fooled the entire world to get the unearned prosperity of the 00s.

This is a superficial comment. How does downvoting work here? edit: (requires karma level > 500)

Downvoted it for you.

Greeks didn't scam anybody, on the contrary, they were scammed by EU leaders and bankers. After signing the EU pacts, there was little their politicians could do to avert the catastrophe (and what little they could, they still didn't.)

Re: In Greece, Property Is Debt

#47
post #35

Some examples of inheritance would be either old houses at the village or small olive groves. Many old houses at the village are derelict and the small olive groves have little financial value. The olive groves are generally small because they have been divided among the children through the generations. If an olive grove is not tended for 5-10 years, it becomes unusable and costly to fix.

So overvalued property in the current economic context combined with unprecedented (for Greece) property taxes is making home ownership a burden? Plus the maintenance costs wipe out what remains of the value.

Re: In Greece, Property Is Debt

#48
post #13
post #3

The system is fucked beyond repair. There is no 'Greek' system or 'English' system - it's all the same, it's all interconnected - so someone in Europe must live the consequences of political decisions in China or the United States or any other country, really. And that's to be expected, because the system was not 'engineered', but hacked together in time - sometimes in response to crises, sometimes influenced by insa…

>This is the rare case when refactoring just doesn't cut it, we need a complete rewrite of the whole thing. Does anyone have access to the world government dev environment? I mean the code may need re-writing but we could probably use the same infrastructure.

>Does anyone have access to the world government dev environment

The banks with super admin privileges to create money in their databases do.

Re: In Greece, Property Is Debt

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Decisions for themselves? Hah. It's not in the article, but Schäuble and the other EU finance ministers have set out to make an example out of Greece, or the apparatchiks just don't like the radical lefties that got into power. Paul Krugman has mused, before, EUcrats could tell government officials what to do, and when they follow them, even if the country fails and they get voted out, they'd get cushy EU jobs. But t…

Just so I'm clear, you are claiming that the finance ministers are purposely rigging things so that Greece will fail -- that all those loans and such were part of a plan to make an example out of them. First I've heard of this, but I haven't been following it. It sounds quite far-fetched though. I must be missing something.

Not quite like that, or at least the "rigging" part. Yanis Varoufakis, former finance ministers of Greece, has talked about how the finance ministers were pushing for the "failed policies", all through I don't remember what the reasons were.

Re: In Greece, Property Is Debt

#50
post #17

Apart from inheritance, the parents can also set up a form of "parental donation" of their property to their children, but continue to make full use of the property (live on the property or keep all the rent) as long as they are alive. And the difference between "inheritance" and "parental donation", is that the latter was set up decades ago when it was cheap to do so. What you are reading in this article is cases wh…

> What you are reading in this article is cases where they did not plan for the future.

Weird how that sentence became what it is with the benefit of hindsight. If things had gone the other way, and inheritance was cheaper than parental donation, you'd be saying "those chumps donated when it was more expensive and did not plan for the future".

It's easy to plan for the future when you already know what it will be. In other cases, I wouldn't be so absolute.

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