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Thomas Piketty: “Germany has never repaid.”

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Re: Thomas Piketty: “Germany has never repaid.”

#301

Post by toyg »

claudius wrote: post #291
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As well as ignoring the banks culpability here, you're doing the same thing the original starter of this thread wanted to point out. Greece is a country, not a person. Did all Greeks benefit equally from that money? Or is large amounts of it sitting in accounts of corrupt politicians and the corporations (not necessarily Greek ones) that the money got spent on. I've seen accusations that the high military spending go…

> Greece is a country, not a person. Did all Greeks benefit equally from that money? If they haven’t, that’s an issue internal to Greece to be sorted out by Greek people. You can’t continuously elect corrupt oligarchic governments for 40 years and then turn around and shout “Not my fault!!” if these governments don’t act in your best interest.

> You can’t continuously elect corrupt oligarchic governments for 40 years and then turn around and shout “Not my fault!!”

Oh, like Americans complaining that they didn't want to invade Iraq? Those same Americans who have elected Bushes and Clintons for about 30 years now? Yup, quite unacceptable, really. They don't even have the excuse of having been ruled by a dictatorship for 10 years because of the Cold War, or having been born on one of the most strategic bits of land in the world from a military perspective, or having to fight ethnic wars with their immediate neighbours.

Someone once said something about beams in your own eye...

Re: Thomas Piketty: “Germany has never repaid.”

#302

Post by claudius »

toyg wrote: post #301
claudius wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Greece is a country, not a person. Did all Greeks benefit equally from that money? If they haven’t, that’s an issue internal to Greece to be sorted out by Greek people. You can’t continuously elect corrupt oligarchic governments for 40 years and then turn around and shout “Not my fault!!” if these governments don’t act in your best interest.

> You can’t continuously elect corrupt oligarchic governments for 40 years and then turn around and shout “Not my fault!!” Oh, like Americans complaining that they didn't want to invade Iraq? Those same Americans who have elected Bushes and Clintons for about 30 years now? Yup, quite unacceptable, really. They don't even have the excuse of having been ruled by a dictatorship for 10 years because of the Cold War, or h…

Hu? Of course Americans are responsible for the war in Iraq, where did I ever say something else?

Re: Thomas Piketty: “Germany has never repaid.”

#303

Post by pluma »

rustynails wrote: post #270
Chinjut wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea isn't that Germans have incurred a special moral responsibility (which they otherwise would not have) because Germany received debt forgiveness 60 years ago. Rather, the idea is that the debt forgiveness Germany received 60 years ago ended up working out quite well, most of us would agree. Thus, we would do well to learn from this history, instead of dogmatically keeping debt forgiveness off the table.

I apologise if this sounds bad, because it is. Maybe there's some truth to the "Germany should show compassion like the allies did". To quote, "he Allies also confiscated large amounts of German intellectual property (patents and copyrights, but also trademarks).[27] Beginning immediately after the German surrender and continuing for the next two years the US pursued a vigorous program to harvest all technological an…

The US not only confiscated large amounts of intellectual property, they also extracted a significant number of highly qualified academics (e.g. Operation Paperclip). These people weren't all innocent victims of the nazi regime either -- not that we will ever find out as nearly all of them were pardoned in return for working for the US government.

Germans are somewhat aware that the Soviet Union practically strip mined the industry in East Germany after the war but what the other Allies (and the US in particular) did is less widely known. Especially the fact that the original (pre-Marshall) plan was to convert Germany to a pre-industrial level (which would have been a death sentence for a large part of the population which would have been unable to sustain itself on agriculture alone) to avoid a repeat of the mobilization that enabled the Blitz.

Also, there was quite a bit of reparations going on after WW2. I'd wager that every German adult has heard stories from their grandparents about stealing supplies off those trains -- something that became so frequent the archbishop of Cologne (Cardinal Frings) absolved the practice and people began calling it "fringsen".

War means everybody loses -- even the "winners". There are no good guys, just various degrees of badness.

Re: Thomas Piketty: “Germany has never repaid.”

#304

Post by coldtea »

afsina wrote: post #219
coldtea wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This makes me lose respect for Piketty. There's a very clear difference between a country that comes out of two world wars, with everything all but destroyed, including millions dead. Yes. The main difference being that Greece didn't invade anyone, didn't cause millions of deaths and didn't exterminate 6 million Jews. Just over-borrowed. And it has paid for it with 5 years destruction of its economy (40-50% effecti…

>Yes. The main difference being that Greece didn't invade anyone.... Actually Greece Invaded Turkey in WW-I. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Turkish_War_(1919%E2%80%...

Context, please.

Greece, the nation, emerged after liberating its land from centuries of Turkish (then Ottoman) occupation (with several failed smaller scale attempts at independence in between).

After the Ottoman Empire was collapsing, the succeeding regime, the "new turks" who created Turkey, started an ethnic cleansing attempt, killing millions of Greek Pontians, Armenians, Assyrians etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_genocide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Genocide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assyrian_genocide

After a decade of this happening, Greece (and with the assistance and encouragement of Western powers) invaded Asia Minor, where 1.5 million of Greek ethnicity were still living among the other local populations. Then the Greek army had the not so brilliant idea to march forward to the inner Turkey, and they got slashed. A massacre followed, with the Turkish army slaghtering the Greek population of Asia Minor (including in a great fire), and creating huge swarths of immigrants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Fire_of_Smyrna

So, I'd say Greece paid quite hard for that "invasion", but also that: a) 1.5 million of your people living in a place, b) some centuries of occupation, c) a decade of genocide, more or less justifies some kind of military campaign.

Re: Thomas Piketty: “Germany has never repaid.”

#305

Post by cuillevel3 »

Germany was rescued after WW2 to drive the European economy. Without German exports the continent would have had no chance to recover. It's sure ironic that Germany first destroyed the continent and then profited by rebuilding it, but history doesn't seem to care about irony much.

I think the 'Germany never paid'-argument is flawed. The Marshall plan would not have worked if Germany had been indebted. Instead this happened: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_reparations_for_World_W...

If Greek defaults without paying their debt Germany (=tax payers) is about to lose 90 billions. I'm not sure how this is profiting...

Re: Thomas Piketty: “Germany has never repaid.”

#306

Post by claudius »

toyg wrote: post #298
claudius wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The money from the bailout programme went into the banks, sure. But that only happened because those banks had given out loans to Greece before. I agree that banks made some income from interest rates and also because they bought Greek bonds at lower-than-face value. However, somehow these bonds were still issued by Greece and bought by someone. Where did the money from all these bonds go? To Greece.

No, the banks didn't "make some money" -- they dramatically reduced their exposition to junk bonds at a point in time when that was an existential threats to them. For a number of European banks, that bailout kept them alive . Which is what the bailout was granted in the first place: because European authorities knew it was a bailout for their own banks , who had made terrible decisions in their continuous search for…

So junk bonds now just materialise out of nowhere in banks’ books and nobody got money from the bank in the first place? That seems slightly unusual…

Re: Thomas Piketty: “Germany has never repaid.”

#307

Post by pluma »

jsprogrammer wrote: post #143
nostromo wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd draw a distinction between debts incurred by a democratically elected government and otherwise. I also think reparations are fundamentally different than loans. Comparing war reparations to loans is blurring the lines to make a political point.

The Nazi government was more or less democratically elected, at least as much as Greece's government. Germany had loans forgiven less than one decade after they were systematically killing tens of thousands of people per day in gas chambers, human ovens, or worse and barely twelve years after they had firebombed London and other cities, resulting in 40,000 dead civilians.

I wonder why Germany never suffered any consequences for what they did in WW2.

Oh, wait. They did. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yalta_Conference

Re: Thomas Piketty: “Germany has never repaid.”

#308

Post by toyg »

claudius wrote: post #306
toyg wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the banks didn't "make some money" -- they dramatically reduced their exposition to junk bonds at a point in time when that was an existential threats to them. For a number of European banks, that bailout kept them alive . Which is what the bailout was granted in the first place: because European authorities knew it was a bailout for their own banks , who had made terrible decisions in their continuous search for…

So junk bonds now just materialise out of nowhere in banks’ books and nobody got money from the bank in the first place? That seems slightly unusual…

Of course it takes two to tango; but if I give you $50 knowing full well that you're never going to repay it, who "deserves" to be punished? Even more so when I know that my $50 will actually be used to buy (weapons|etc) from my friend.

In this unjust world, as it happens, "I" was bailed out by the taxpayer community that stepped in and made me whole; however, it's clear that you still can't repay them like you couldn't repay me. What are they supposed to do? One option is enslaving your family for a long time (austerity); another is to just let go and forget about the money, you just won't do business with them anymore (which is what is happening, with the previous Greek elite being slowly kicked out); another still is knocking on my friend's door. Note how this last option is always absent from public discourse. In any case, now I'm free to pontificate on how bad you are and how I shouldn't have given you money in the first place because you're a lazy scumbag, although of course I knew this from day 1. Is that fair?

Re: Thomas Piketty: “Germany has never repaid.”

#309

Post by antientropic »

golergka wrote: post #238
Atropos wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh but the current generation of Germans has a moral responsibility to help the current generation of Greeks because Germany got debt forgiveness 60 years ago ???

> moral responsibility to help No. No one is saying that. People are saying that Germans should help Greece because it's a rational thing to do. No one, except complete idiots, is saying that they have moral obligation to do it. Here's the quote from OP: > Nonsense! This had nothing to do with moral clarity; it was a rational political and economic decision

Actually, plenty of people are saying that, including the Syriza government who unwisely kept bringing up World War II reparations over the last few months.

Re: Thomas Piketty: “Germany has never repaid.”

#310

Post by xyzzy123 »

junto wrote: post #243
Chinjut wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea isn't that Germans have incurred a special moral responsibility (which they otherwise would not have) because Germany received debt forgiveness 60 years ago. Rather, the idea is that the debt forgiveness Germany received 60 years ago ended up working out quite well, most of us would agree. Thus, we would do well to learn from this history, instead of dogmatically keeping debt forgiveness off the table.

Although I agree with you, the situations are a bit different. In the case of post WWII it was widely recognised that Germany's debt and war reparations were a major cause of WWII and helped with the rise of the National Socialist Party in Germany. Greece doesn't have a modern history of military aggression. Germany did. What the Allies put in place was in their own interests. The Allies didn't want to make that mist…

Wait, are you saying that if Greece had a national socialist party, then it would be rational to extend debt relief?
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