Review of “Adults in the Room” by Yanis Varoufakis • Hacker News Board

Re: Review of “Adults in the Room” by Yanis Varoufakis

#101

Post by dang » Wed, May 03, 2017, 6:52 PM UTC

elorant wrote: post #100

atmosx wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Please, give me a break. You're confusing Varoufakis with Leventis. Varoufakis, to this day, is always put under unjustifiable strain by the Greek media. As far as your previous post, it's so mis-informed and ill-conceived, that the fact that you have a right to vote in my country scares the shit out of me. > Just because some of us don't agree with defaulting it doesn't mean we're in the elite or we're serving som…

As far as your previous post, it's so mis-informed and ill-conceived, that the fact that you have a right to vote in my country scares the shit out of me. Sure, only people who agree with you should vote. I find it quite ironic that this comes from someone who supports a leftist government. As for being misinformed, you could provide something useful to the conversation by arguing with facts. Because all you've done…

Please stop, both of you. Internecine spats probably don't belong on HN in the first place, but if you can't address each other civilly, that's definitely not ok.

Re: Review of “Adults in the Room” by Yanis Varoufakis

#102

Post by tptacek » Wed, May 03, 2017, 6:58 PM UTC

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #30

Scea91 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't Greece falsify data for years? That would explain the AAA ratings.

Greece has been cooking the books for a long time, even their entrance into the EU was fradulant. Greece is the blame here via its decades of fraud that finally caught up with it. As a Greek-American with an interest in Greece being successful I think all the finger pointing at Wall Street or Germany is asinine. Greece is horribly corrupt and tax dodging is like its national sport. Its like someone turned Chicago int…

People in Chicago pay taxes. You know the city well and know this isn't a valid comparison. If you have to use our shared hometown as an epithet, make it one that's relevant to the place.

Re: Review of “Adults in the Room” by Yanis Varoufakis

#103

Post by pjc50 » Wed, May 03, 2017, 7:20 PM UTC

marcosdumay wrote: post #75

pjc50 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> only sensible thing to do is default The problem here was cashflow; defaulting might save you from more loan payments, although actually doing it is quite painful under international law (see Argentina). But Greece needed to take out further loans in order to meet immediate public funding needs - and defaulting would have prevented that, or made it much more expensive. I've turned this over in my head a number of t…

"The only way out" != "trouble free" Obviously Greece needs a balanced budget for defaulting. Too bad it seems to be moving the other way.

If they'd been able to balance the budget, they wouldn't have been in that state in the first place!

Re: Review of “Adults in the Room” by Yanis Varoufakis

#104

Post by andy_ppp » Wed, May 03, 2017, 7:20 PM UTC

dragandj wrote: post #98

andy_ppp wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Morally it's on those who give out loans to make sure that they can be repaid. It's wrong that Greece took these huge loans as well, but also it's wrong to suggest that they have to pay them back. Everyone has the option to default when they are unable to pay and this was clearly the situation for Greece (and probably Spain and Italy, maybe even UK soon enough).

And they ARE making sure the debt is going to be repaid.

Nope, they will almost certainly default on a large proportion of it.

Re: Review of “Adults in the Room” by Yanis Varoufakis

#105

Post by return0 » Wed, May 03, 2017, 7:22 PM UTC

atmosx wrote: post #91

RobertoG wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"but if you take the time to read/watch his interview his thinking is crystal clear" And here is, I think, the problem. In general people don't take the time, and that's OK, but then they have not problem in having a strong opinion, that they read in some interested media. My advice to the people so inclined is: check some of Varoufakis (and others) youtube interviews. Read a little about what is going on. Check, for…

Varoufakis is a kind of special case . I believe his personality combined with his charisma, puts fear in the establishment so they needed to discredit him as much as possible. For example if you read the picture The Economist paints around him, as opposed to Dijsselbloem (Dutch Minister of Finance) who is technically several orders of magnitude inferior is astonishing. Varoufakis said that when he went to the US, at…

You are correct that he is all drama but we need to see more substance. None of his positions were actually original, and his actions are constantly divisive. I m sure he s interesting as a superstar tv person, but, other than his storytelling about the eurogroup meetings, his thought is not that coherent, it changes often and he often attacks strawmen (eg his critique of piketty). It makes him a lively interviewee, but doesnt gain him academic credit.

Re: Review of “Adults in the Room” by Yanis Varoufakis

#106

Post by Tomte » Wed, May 03, 2017, 7:22 PM UTC

atmosx wrote: post #67

davrosthedalek wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As does the EU.

> As does the EU. Are you trolling? What kind of mechanism does the EU have? How does Germany have such a high surplus if such a mechanism is in place?!

Trade surplus is neither evil nor a problem in itself.

Re: Review of “Adults in the Room” by Yanis Varoufakis

#107

Post by pm90 » Wed, May 03, 2017, 7:35 PM UTC

pvg wrote: post #40

andy_ppp wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you are proved wrong by the fact Greece's government clearly was (still is?) "an unsophisticated or under-informed borrower". I mean the outcome of this borrowing speaks for itself. When I take out a loan a bank usually asks for collateral but these loans to Greece are unsecured and not worth paying back. The banking system should have been left to fail but instead we live in this world where governments bailed t…

No, the fact someone takes out loans they can't repay doesn't 'prove' they don't understand the terms of the loan. I don't think any of the major actors in this look particularly great but it's not like the Greek government found a giant bag of money on their doorstep one day and nobody told them it came with terms.

Wait...what? The Greek govt. that took out the loans was incompetent, sure. But so were the lenders. Making a loan is taking a risk for both the lender and the receiver of the loan. It is in both of their interest to ensure that the loan will be repaid.

Re: Review of “Adults in the Room” by Yanis Varoufakis

#108

Post by pm90 » Wed, May 03, 2017, 7:40 PM UTC

atmosx wrote: post #79

dnautics wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Default is a solution if you have a plan to not ever incur sovereign debt. This however is impossible with neoliberal social state governing models.

Nope, history says otherwise. As long as the debt stands Greece will not be able to get any financing exactly because it's assured that it will not be repaid. The only way to get financing is by debt restructuring. It has happened time and again. You'd be amazed how many countries defaulted the last century. I think Germany defaulted twice.

Yeah, I just don't understand how so many people fail to see the most obvious solution: default and stop paying interest. Sure, you're credibility will be lost for now, but then you can slowly build it back up again since you're no longer burdened with paying back the defaulted loans. Its not magical: as it currently stands, Greek economy is going to die a slow protracted death anyways.

Re: Review of “Adults in the Room” by Yanis Varoufakis

#109

Post by return0 » Wed, May 03, 2017, 7:43 PM UTC

cinquemb wrote: post #55

elorant wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Greece's problem isn't the debt. It's the competitiveness of the economy, or more precisely the lack of. Even if we had all our debt erased, the way the economy is structured we'd be back in the same place give it a couple of decades, at most. We spend so much money paying pensions that it's a given we'd default one way or the other. Furthermore, you can't just default on the debt just by saying so. There's a naivety…

> Furthermore, you can't just default on the debt just by saying so. There's a naivety among mostly Greeks that just by going back to drachma and defaulting on our debt will magically solve all of our problems. In a country that imports pretty much everything that would be catastrophic. Well thinking from a trader perspective, by defaulting and going back to the drachma (and leaving the EU), Greece would have more fl…

This would require a big plunge in the greek economy that people are not willing to take. To be able to recover swiftly from such a crash, the greek economy would have to switch from a very inflexible and sclerotic one (that it is now) to an adaptible, flexible and liberal one. The demographics of Greece do not support such swift action - greece is aging rapidly and the brain drain has gotten really intense. With regards to trade, greece probably benefits from things like e.g. the common agricultural policy more than it loses through restrictions. There is little support for grexit, because of a) the rhetoric and FUD from almost all political parties (including the pro-euro syriza) and EU and b) because there is not enough consensus on the side of the people to go through what would amount to a revolution.

Re: Review of “Adults in the Room” by Yanis Varoufakis

#110

Post by AnimalMuppet » Wed, May 03, 2017, 8:09 PM UTC

atmosx wrote: post #88

davrosthedalek wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has TRADE surplus. You were talking about funds. There is a substantial amount of money flowing from Germany, France and others into less fortunate countries via EU governed programs.

No I'm talking about TRADE surplus.

But EastLondonCoder and davrosthedalek were not talking about trade surplus. You are yelling at them for saying something that is true, because they're not talking about what you think they're talking about.