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The average Greek is working a full 40% longer than the average German

bbc.co.uk

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Re: The average Greek is working a full 40% longer than the average German

#131

Post by muyuu »

lispm wrote: post #121
muyuu wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rates always follow the needs of Germany and sometimes France. The rates are discretionary and set by the president of the ECB. Borrowing in most countries with a "hot" Real Estate market was unstoppable. Only higher rates like they historically had could have controlled it. The dimension of the damage done by this policy is incalculable. There was no compromise. If a middle-ground, 5-6% rate had been set, the co…

The EU consists of independent countries which have their own governments, their own economic policies, their own banks, ... a real-estate bubble in Greece is fully the responsibility of Greece. A hot 'real-estate' market not stoppable? Where was it tried? How about Mexico? Would the US pay for Mexico to prevent a bancruptcy there?

If someone in the US decided the interbank interest rate, then they would have shared responsibility.

You are very misguided. The EU is one thing and the eurozone is a different thing. The UK does have some economic independence and very importantly, monetary independence. Those countries in the eurozone have surrendered their monetary policy to the ECB, and the ECB responds mostly to the interests of Germany, followed by France, followed by Italy, Spain and then smaller countries.

The economic cycle of Germany is substantially out of phase with that of most countries from Southern Europe, who in turn thought the Germans would pay for the party. In any case it wasn't their call. Turns up things have snowballed out of control.

Re: The average Greek is working a full 40% longer than the average German

#132

Post by jussij »

arethuza wrote: post #22
jussij wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> where did all the money go They spent the money. It's no difference to running up a big credit card debt, but at some point you have to pay it back. What went wrong for Greece was it maxed out it's government credit card and none of the banks would let them up their credit limit. Now the goverment doesn't have a lot of money comming in but it still has a massive debt. That debt has to be payed back or else they hav…

Well, for sake of argument, if it all went on buying Porsches and Mercedes then it's pretty easy to tell where the money went....

Most of the money was used for general government spending.

Governments earn money with taxes, fees etc and spend money on infrastructure, health, pensions, education, public servants etc.

Now the problem with Greece is not unlike what is also happening in the US today.

The money the Greek government spent was always more than the money they earned.

To cover the difference they just printed Greek Bonds and sold these to European banks to cover the shortfall.

Where things went wrong for Greece is not long ago they printed another round of Greek Bonds only to find none of the banks would buy them.

So overnight the Greek government runs out of money and is broke.

Now they need German/French EU handouts to cover this shortfall but the Germans/Frenchs won't give them money uless they agree to big spending cuts.

Hence the current impass.

Re: The average Greek is working a full 40% longer than the average German

#133

Post by gruseom »

We keep hearing about the lazy Greeks being bailed out, but isn't it really the banks who lent too much money to Greece who are being bailed out? If the Greeks are so lazy and corrupt, then it was foolish to lend them so much. Why should laziness be punished while foolishness is rewarded? Which poses the greater systemic threat?

Re: The average Greek is working a full 40% longer than the average German

#134

Post by zerostar07 »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #123
zerostar07 wrote: post #19

That number is (more than) a bit misleading. I don't know where OECD pulls those numbers but it certainly doesn't feel as if Greeks work more than the average european. Shops dont work on sundays, public services are open for only a few hours a day, banks close at 2 etc. Underproductivity is a major issue, most of the work of public services is unnecessary red tape that could be easily automated if the government was…

>Work hours is not our major problem, it's work ethics that are lacking. The problem here is that you can't quantify "ethics." Up until today everyone believed your average Greek worked 3-4 hours a day and drank coffee the rest of the day. So your side has been debunked and you come back with "ethics?" Really? At the end of the day these issues are fairly complex. There are a lot of Greeks who work hard, are far from…

I agree it's a stereotype, and i agree that it only takes a few reforms to fix it, but attacking the stereotype won't fix anything. My experience from working in both the private and public sector (and now luckily as an entrepreneur) is this, and i m not bashing anyone, but there is such a thing called "work ethic" and i 've lived long enough to watch it being bent with unsustainable consequences.

I disagree that it takes a mountain of money to do anything successful, especially in technology, even in Greece (and it is happening, but successful businesses tend to be quiet). However you do need entrepreneurs who can do more than just lobby the government for public sector works.

Re: The average Greek is working a full 40% longer than the average German

#135

Post by jhpriestley »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #101

Facts that reconcile this article with what we already know: 1. The Greek labour market is inefficien t. That is why so many people work in small (inefficient) shops. Closed shop regulation for many professions lock people out of high wage occupations. Next to Portugal's 28% high school graduation rate [1] Greece's recent progress ( 2. Doing business is tough . Here is an anecdote from a financial commentator in Athe…

A commenter from the page you linked:

the anecdote about the bookstore is very weird. Bookstores in Greece are open (and selling) until 9pm, not before 6pm as in the anecdote, I’m not sure what’s up with that. Airport bookstores are often open (and selling) 24 hours/day. I live in Greece and after seeing this article spread all over the internet, went to a local bookstore last night just to check. The bookstore owner looked at me like I was out of my mind. “Would I be sitting here burning the lights and paying my employee if I couldn’t sell books? That makes no sense.” So, you know, there’s that…. (And I’ve personally bought books late into the night in many, many parts of Greece.) Don’t let that affect how you interpret such anecdotes, of course. Even if something is wrong, if it sounds correct, we might as well treat it as such, right? I think that’s how this works….

It seems to me, too, like an extraordinary story, I'd like to see more context on this supposed ban on bookselling in the evening.

Re: The average Greek is working a full 40% longer than the average German

#136

Post by ArbitraryLimits »

TelmoMenezes wrote: post #59

I don't know about Greece, but I grew up in Portugal, and I suspect there are some similarities. People in Portugal "work" long hours. But they also work in a very infective way: long useless meetings, everything requires lengthy social interactions, bizantine bureaucracy, too many managers for too few real workers and so on. There are complex cultural problems that cannot be expressed by such simplistic metrics (and…

Have you guys ever worked for a big company in the United States? Because I have some news for you...

Seriously though, it's interesting to hear these opinions about the sources of work inefficiency inside the EU. I'm American but lived in Italy for several years in the late 90s, and "Why is our economy so inefficient?" was a common topic of discussion at the time. Almost no one thought it was because of long meetings or too many managers; there seemed to be a consensus among the people I spoke with that the number one problem was the type of regulation mentioned above (e.g. not being able to sell books after 18h in a bookstore).

It's important to realize that lots of those regulations do actually have a purpose, which is to keep certain sectors of the economy dominated by small sole proprietorships instead of by big corporations. Again with the bookstore example, a Borders or Barnes and Noble or any other big box store chain would just give up on such a market. On the other hand, an owner/operator of a small bookstore would either find loopholes (like this owner's swap with the cafe owner across the street) or else they just grease the right palms and work around the rules. In either case, success depends on the kind of social capital big corporations will never have.

TL;DR The purpose of these "senseless" regulations is to keep shops in Europe small and charming. Inefficiency is the tradeoff.

Re: The average Greek is working a full 40% longer than the average German

#137

Post by sunir »

cafard wrote: post #83
yequalsx wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When a market is flooded with easy, cheap money distortions occur. Witness the housing excesses in the U.S. prior to 2008. This is a phenomenon of human nature. Excess credit inevitably leads to too many bad loans.

This stuff is cyclical. The deregulation of S&L rates in the 1980s led to huge problems.

Business cycles and political (mis)intervention in the market are orthogonal concepts.

Re: The average Greek is working a full 40% longer than the average German

#138

Post by nickik »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #127
nickik wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would look into Hisotry and Economic Theory befor you make such clames. Specially about the size of banks, the US had strong regulations on bank sizes for a long time (I dont know when the stoped exactlly) and that lead to a massiv amount of bank failure in the great depression. About 8000 Banks failed in the US, most of them single branch (this is in a system with a central bank), while you look at canada where yo…

It sounds fine to me to have small banks failing with FDIC around. People don't lose their money, and someone with better business sense starts a new branch.

I think deposit insurence is great but Im not sure why the state should provide it. Most of the Bankruns happend befor the FDIC (1933). The problem with the FDIC is just that it makes, that people dont run on banks. Bank runs or often 'good' in the sence that banks that are overleveriged get finally taken down. As sooner as banks are taken town the more return you get for every doller in the bank.

With the FDIC and the FED banks can go on longer then the should and therfore pay back less when they are finally go down.

Re: The average Greek is working a full 40% longer than the average German

#139

Post by nickik »

anotherthrow wrote: post #128
nickik wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would look into Hisotry and Economic Theory befor you make such clames. Specially about the size of banks, the US had strong regulations on bank sizes for a long time (I dont know when the stoped exactlly) and that lead to a massiv amount of bank failure in the great depression. About 8000 Banks failed in the US, most of them single branch (this is in a system with a central bank), while you look at canada where yo…

>I dont know when the stoped exactlly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass%E2%80%93Steagall_Act 'Many commentators have stated that the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act’s repeal of the affiliation restrictions of the Glass-Steagall Act was an important cause of the late-2000s financial crisis.' Here in the UK we had something similar with the 'big bang' of bank liberalisation in the 1980s, resulting in the City of London becomin…

Fanny Mea and Fredy Mac pushed down the cost of housing (the where allowed to directly lend from the fed, that had low intresst rates) and set false insentives to build houses. That (among some other small things) was the big thing that led to the crash.

The deregulations allowed banks to be more agressiv, that is only bad if you give them a strong insentiv to be agressiv. Maybe it mad some of them more unstable but it would not have changed the fundamentals of the crash and it is in such a situation only more importent that YOU DONT BAILE THEM OUT.

Prof. Selgin is btw a well regard specialist on banking and money, he does not earn his money from the Cato Institute and they dont direct his research. Its nice that only attack where somebody is working not what they say.kj

Since all you did was paste the first counter argumetn you fund on wikipedia I highly doute that you even no any ecnomics, and only posted it because of your 'deregulation = bad' bias.

I was only mentioning the Free Banking School because of the comment "suitably sized and regulated" is not the only way of looking at things. Infact I think pretty much every economist agrees that the banking regulation pre 1933 where very bad and made the great depression worse. Passing rules to make banks smaller does not really help in itself.

If you have read the article by Stigliz that is refrenced after your comment on wikipedia, you will see that stigliz agrees that the bubble was caused by inflation ("Greenspan presided over not one but two financial bubbles. After the high-tech bubble popped, in 2000-2001, he helped inflate the housing bubble.") and he says:

"The most important consequence of the repeal of Glass-Steagall was indirect - it lay in the way repeal changed an entire culture. Commercial banks are not supposed to be high-risk ventures; they are supposed to manage other people's money very conservatively. It is with this understanding that the government agrees to pick up the tab should they fail."

What you will notice that he is pro bailing out bank! The banks that failed in the crash where not acctually banks that where "Commerical banks" but the government bailed them out anyways! Its funny that the free-market guys are the ones that are "pro-buissness" acctually its the other way arount people like him are the reason taxpayer are paying for failed banks.

Free Market guys dont go deregulate and then bailout, if a bank investment or not goes done thats what they deserve!

Re: The average Greek is working a full 40% longer than the average German

#140

Post by Uchikoma »

muyuu wrote: post #131
lispm wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EU consists of independent countries which have their own governments, their own economic policies, their own banks, ... a real-estate bubble in Greece is fully the responsibility of Greece. A hot 'real-estate' market not stoppable? Where was it tried? How about Mexico? Would the US pay for Mexico to prevent a bancruptcy there?

If someone in the US decided the interbank interest rate, then they would have shared responsibility. You are very misguided. The EU is one thing and the eurozone is a different thing. The UK does have some economic independence and very importantly, monetary independence. Those countries in the eurozone have surrendered their monetary policy to the ECB, and the ECB responds mostly to the interests of Germany, follow…

Yes it is out of sync b/c Germany cut costs in the 2000, cut social security, changed job laws, increased the minimum pension age etc while the southern countries increased spending and increased massively labor costs.
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