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In Greece, Property Is Debt

nytimes.com

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Re: In Greece, Property Is Debt

#221

Post by trab »

charlesdm wrote: post #121
return0 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not wrong. Greece experienced a property bubble that is bursting painfully slowly. Homeownership is high in greece; it's part of the culture and successive governments protected it despite its heavy cost as a populist measure (e.g. by instituting laws that disallowed foreclosures). The bubble has not yet burst completely, that's why rent prices are very cheap.

Is it worth moving to Greece at this point if you have sufficient (ways of generating) capital to sustain your lifestyle? Or would that be a fools errand given the state of the economy?

If you can generate income from all over the world Greece is a great place to work at. Great weather, great food, private health coverage with about 1K per year, private international schools for about 1K per month. Life and especially rent is pretty cheap compared to other European cities.

The problem though is that there is always a danger of a Venezuela style collapse but you can always move out.

Re: In Greece, Property Is Debt

#222

Post by AnimalMuppet »

akytt wrote: post #215
crdoconnor wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's not that the electorate didn't consistently vote for the political leaderships which are/were, at least partially, responsible for the situation Greece finds itself in right now. That isn't really true. In both of the previous elections they voted for parties promising to end austerity. In both cases it wasn't even as if the parties didn't want to end austerity but when they tried they were basically threatened…

Why is it that these people are nice and kind when they finance your government spending for decades but turn into facist greedy bastards when they come asking for their money back? That's what it boils down to. Why is that that everybody else starting from EC and ECB and ending with corrupt polititians (who, it would seem, have magically appeared from amongst non-greek) is to blame but I'm yet to see any citizen tak…

> That's democracy for you. Your right to vote comes with a responsibility for the consequences.

True. But as a US citizen, that's also very frightening at the moment...

Re: In Greece, Property Is Debt

#223

Post by aluhut »

hx87 wrote: post #138
neffy wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other problem is that the Economists who try to control it and debug it are terrible at understanding it. Every countries economy is subtly different, but they have a one size fits nobody, and doesn´t even have the right number of sleeves approach to it. For example, Greece. http://www.tradingeconomics.com/greece/money-supply-m3 Expand it out to the max - this is an old style, US Great Depression monetary collaps…

> Revalue Greece debt though, and there goes a whole bunch of European banks with greek debt on their books, and a GFC style cascade failure to who knows where in the system. If that's true, then one possible solution would be to let the cascade failure happen while the ECB prints enough money to replace the losses in money supply (and then some) and distribute the money equally to everyone in the Eurozone.

The official answer to this that it would cause uncertainty regarding future decisions.

And I won't even start with devaluation, the geopolitical position of Greece or the chaos on the streets.

Re: In Greece, Property Is Debt

#224

Post by atmosx »

jfoutz wrote: post #214
kkapelon wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Numbers don't really say anything if you don't explain who decides them. Here are two scenarios for you 1)I live in Greece and get 400 Euros a month and barely break even. I live in a house (inherited by my parents) that would fetch probably 90.000 in the market. Government says that it really costs 300.000 euros. I get taxed for it even though I cannot really afford it. 2)I am unemployed and live with my parents. Th…

You have no way to challenge the assessor? Here (U.S.) you could put together a book of 50-100 similar houses and their sale prices. Take that to court and have the house reassessed. The US isn't corruption free, but in my limited experience, it's hard to have an assessment wildly out of line with reality, 3x would be hard to justify.

> You have no way to challenge the assessor?

No you have not. The tax is based on a tag price the gov puts on your property which might be 10x more than the actually market value (sometimes even 50x, not kidding).

Greece is a more like a dormitory these days. It's a miracle people still survive here, but economic activity is virtually dead and indirect taxation is still on the raise.

Re: In Greece, Property Is Debt

#225

Post by AnimalMuppet »

crdoconnor wrote: post #191
sasvari wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I would vote for revolution - national default, totally new political leadership - and start to rebuild the country from scratch. Anything is better than decades of externally enforced austerity crippling a country's spirit as reflected in everything I read these days about Greece. Looking at the democratically elected politicians/governments in Greece in the last decades I don't know where a totally new p…

>It's not that the electorate didn't consistently vote for the political leaderships which are/were, at least partially, responsible for the situation Greece finds itself in right now. That isn't really true. In both of the previous elections they voted for parties promising to end austerity. In both cases it wasn't even as if the parties didn't want to end austerity but when they tried they were basically threatened…

> ... and they're not even really pretending it's about getting paid back any more.

No, and it never was (though they may have pretended that it was at one time). It is, and was, about keeping Greece from economically destroying all of Europe.

But since they're providing the money that keeps Greece out of the abyss, they get to call the tune, no matter whether it's about getting their money back or not...

Re: In Greece, Property Is Debt

#226

Post by akytt »

StanislavPetrov wrote: post #208
nugget wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody would buy the house If you put this hypothetical 90k euro house up for sale at a public auction tomorrow, what would it sell for? 50k? 70k? Real assets are usually sale-able, albeit perhaps for less than the owner thinks the asset is worth. > Move to where? Another city? Another country? Unemployment is everywhere in Greece. Since Greece is still in the EU, you can move to any member country right? UK, Germa…

>Personally I would vote for revolution - national default, totally new political leadership - and start to rebuild the country from scratch. That was actually the best of Greece's bad choices, but they were strongarmed by the IMF and the ECB into not defaulting and pulling a brick out of the financial pyramid scheme upon which western society is based.

Ok, a revolution. But, praytell, who would finance that new fresh government? There's little capital in the country, people don't evidently like the idea to start paying taxes all of a sudden and you just screwed over a large group of investors. That money is going to be way more expensive than the average market yield. That means your economic growth will likely not cover the interest payments. Which means you'd take on new loans to pay back your old ones with interest. And we'll be having the exact same conversation in 25 years or so. Yeah, your generation is going to so okish. But the next one will do even worse than you after a fresh round of damage on Greece reputation on financial markets.

Re: In Greece, Property Is Debt

#227

Post by 1337biz »

muse900 wrote: post #217
flexie wrote: post #74

Let's get facts straight: The state property tax in Greece is 0% for property up to €200K. Then 0.2 to 1% from €200K to €5M. Then 2% above €2M. Property taxes are hardly killing the Greek economy and especially not for the poor or the middle class. On the contrary, Greeks are paying very little. The problem is that Greeks used to have much more property than for example Northern Europeans. For comparison, in Denmark…

I won't agree with you just because you are presenting "some" numbers. I know for a fact that my parents that live in Greece, and do not rent and own 3 flats and 1 house all of them divided equally to a different person within the family including me have to pay an "emergency" taxation on the electrical bill which is a lot of money. (A LOT OF MONEY!) Atm my parents are pensioniers and they don't rent neither have any…

Just curious - why do they hold on to those flats if they don't rent them out?

Re: In Greece, Property Is Debt

#228

Post by atmosx »

sasvari wrote: post #187
nugget wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody would buy the house If you put this hypothetical 90k euro house up for sale at a public auction tomorrow, what would it sell for? 50k? 70k? Real assets are usually sale-able, albeit perhaps for less than the owner thinks the asset is worth. > Move to where? Another city? Another country? Unemployment is everywhere in Greece. Since Greece is still in the EU, you can move to any member country right? UK, Germa…

Personally I would vote for revolution - national default, totally new political leadership - and start to rebuild the country from scratch. Anything is better than decades of externally enforced austerity crippling a country's spirit as reflected in everything I read these days about Greece. Looking at the democratically elected politicians/governments in Greece in the last decades I don't know where a totally new p…

Bringing SYRIZA to power was a sort of revolution. For 40 years the Greek political was dominated by 2 parties and before that there was a series of dictatorships, wars, etc. It was another era.

We also held a referendum but the gov capitulated... From there on, I'm not sure who's going to the ballots and why it matters. I mean, for all important matters such as this tax for example, decisions are made at Troika level (EU/ECB/IMF), our gov is just the executive.

Re: In Greece, Property Is Debt

#229

Post by AnimalMuppet »

crdoconnor wrote: post #219
akytt wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it that these people are nice and kind when they finance your government spending for decades but turn into facist greedy bastards when they come asking for their money back? That's what it boils down to. Why is that that everybody else starting from EC and ECB and ending with corrupt polititians (who, it would seem, have magically appeared from amongst non-greek) is to blame but I'm yet to see any citizen tak…

>Why is it that these people are nice and kind when they finance your government spending for decades but turn into facist greedy bastards when they come asking for their money back? They're not trying to get their money back. They're simply taking the reins of power and threatening economic catastrophe if they're disobeyed. It ought to be obvious to anybody with a functioning brain that Greece is not paying down its…

Well, that's how it goes when you take money from someone in order to keep from disaster. They get a say in how things go thereafter.

You write this as if some Greek politicians just woke up one morning and decided to hand over sovereignty to foreigners. That's not how it happened. Greece was forced into it, because Greece had to have foreign money in order to survive. It's been known for 3000 years what the consequences of that situation are - the borrower becomes the lender's slave (Proverbs 22:7).

So the "that's democracy for you" part was when they voted for people whose bad decisions put Greece in that situation.

Re: In Greece, Property Is Debt

#230

Post by hx87 »

aluhut wrote: post #223
hx87 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Revalue Greece debt though, and there goes a whole bunch of European banks with greek debt on their books, and a GFC style cascade failure to who knows where in the system. If that's true, then one possible solution would be to let the cascade failure happen while the ECB prints enough money to replace the losses in money supply (and then some) and distribute the money equally to everyone in the Eurozone.

The official answer to this that it would cause uncertainty regarding future decisions. And I won't even start with devaluation, the geopolitical position of Greece or the chaos on the streets.

Uncertainty would be less of a problem if the ECB's stated goal would be to defend the money supply in the Eurozone through mass distribution.
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