211–220 of 350 posts
This guy is a reknowned economist? He's conflating "war reparations" with "external debt", and also seems to have missed the big fanfare recently when Germany paid the last of it's WWI reparations - instead he claims they never paid any WWI or WWII reparations. Similarly, 'England took 100 years to repay' he claims as the way forward, yet ignores that Germany took 92 to pay their WWI debt[1]. Not hard, I guess, since…
If you believe Piketty, debt is never meant to be repaid and no one should therefore ever invest in sovereign debt. That would solve the debt debate. No creditor = no need to worry about whether we want to pile more debt. And he has a point. I personally don't believe that any of the US, Japanese and European sovereign debt will ever be repaid. The whole thing is a ponzi scheme. Investors hope that their investment w…
It's interesting that Piketty is advocating perpetual debt slavery for the people he pretends to champion the most: the non-rich. It's not the 0.1% that need worry about nations taking on ever increasing debt burdens, and the pressure the interest puts on budgets (including entitlement and welfare systems). It's everyone else that will be crushed by it.
The repayment of Germans debt is only delayed till Germany has a peace treaty. The 2+4 contract is not a peace treaty, but deliberate "instead a peace treaty" just allows the Russian occupied part to join the US, UK and French occupied parts.
The Euro-Zone is facing a dilemma. A debt cut, followed by inflation and taxing of private assets, would require that Greece still has monetary sovereignty. But all Euro states, even Germany and France, gave up their monetary sovereignty. None of them is a complete sovereign state anymore. An obscure bureaucracy in Brüssel is creating laws, that national governments just have to sign. And entering EU is like a roman Catholic marriage. A nation can join, but not leave EU.
This is just stupid. The German regime that racked up the WWII debts was destroyed and its leaders suicided or executed. The entire country was split in half by the war. The regime in power when those debts were rescheduled was a completely different entity. And Greece enjoyed similar, if not proportionately greater, economic support at exactly the same time. The Marshall Plan started in Greece, after all. And there…
> The German regime that racked up the WWII debts was destroyed and its leaders suicided or executed. Yes, but most of the people who enabled that regime to do its work, were still around. It's not as though the entire population of Germany was swapped out for a different one, after the war. The average German was not a murdering genocidal maniac, but he did fall under the sway of idiotic fascism, and while it would…
Greece is the latter. Having been in Greece several times, it is very unsettling to being issued fake bills all the time for everything.
A famous example is the swimming pool tax avoidance:
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/greek-tax-avoidance-101-cov...
Some more information:
http://uk.businessinsider.com/this-is-the-real-reason-greece...
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. I'm sorry, no matter how bad 2008 was, it was no World War. His inability to grasp this just boggles the mind. There's a very big difference between war caused debt and economic caused debt (note that I'm basically making these two "deb…
Ss far as I could understand, that's not the point he's making, at all. He's saying that financially punishing countries is shortsighted and counterproductive and that we have recent examples of doing just that (1918), and doing the opposite (1945/1953), and clearly different outcomes.
The rest of your points are irrelevant - he's not discussing post WW2 recovery in Germany in a void or for fun, like we are, he's trying to steer a super important debate about a Greek exit, which has so far been very simplistic and populist (the greek are lazy and must learn their lesson, even if it means they'll be in debt for 40 years). So he's also pointing out that it just so happens that the same countries are involved, then and now, and calling for a bit of a look at _recent_ history.
Also, points for dropping 100% unsubstantiated nationalism accusations right at the end, great!
At the risk of being a moralizing bore, may I remind everybody that "Germany", "Greece" etc. are not people, and that people are not countries? I am surprised by the national coloring, however faint, of some comments here and there https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9834721 . "I am a German" or "Greek here" should have no relevance to the ideas put forth. "Your money" and "your banks" are not really "my money" and…
OK, I'll try to shed some light on why this subject tends to inflame some of the europeans nationalistic sentiment with a concrete example: 1. Meet Portugal (my country). Some may know us derisively as the P in PIGS because of our financial problems (much similar to the Greek one in nature and extent). In 2010 and 2011 as one of the 14 member states of the EU that were part of the Greek loan facility Portugal contrib…
So I would suggest you redirect your complaints towards the real responsible parties: European bankers and the elites who keep enabling them. Portugal would benefit from getting together with other countries and ask for their money back from the (mostly German and French) financial sector, or at least a big haircut. This is also true of Italy, Spain, Ireland and so on.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not necessarily. In the short run, perhaps, but that's not the point. The point is that your analysis reflects a very poor grasp of what's happening.
I believe you, but could you flesh that critique out some more? My understanding of Greek's fundamentals start here: http://pseudoerasmus.com/2015/02/23/greece-orthodoxy-peronis... (this was linked from the Interfluidity thing everyone was talking about before) and continues through here: http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/scr/2015/cr15165.pdf (which I read when someone claimed Greece had a 2014 primary surplus, whi…
I thought the article about Peronis Democracy was interesting but I need some help seeing the connection to the current crisis.
Judging from your comments it seems like you believe the Greek government is spending more than it's taking in(primary budget deficit). Which is not true at least for 2014 according to the Wall Street Journal. The Greek government needs to borrow more money not to fund additional purchases but to pay off debt that is coming due. For example they have $5 billion(not sure on exact number) worth of debt that matures in 2015 but they will run a primary budget surplus of $2.25 billion so they need to borrow an additional $2.75 billion to pay off the additional debt.
The next few years will be very terrible for Greece, but so have the last few years. The fundamental problem with Greece comes down the idea of a fiscal multiplier, which is how much gdp changes when government spending is cut[1]. Right now the IMF estimates that the fiscal multiplier is 1.7.[0] This means that every dollar the government cuts(increasing the primary budget deficit) reduces the size of the economy by $1.7(which also reduces the governments tax revenue). So the current austerity measures of a surplus of $2.24 billion reduce the size of the Greece economy by at least $3.8 billion[2]. The current Great Depression level unemployment in Greece is the result of cuts in government spending that generated a surplus of just 1%. Imagine what Greece would be like if they achieve their target of 3.5%(was 4.5%).
P.S. excuse any spelling or grammatical errors, its too late for me to be on hacker news.
[0]http://www.eurointelligence.com/news-details/article/imf-adm...
[1]http://www.wsj.com/articles/greece-misses-target-on-budget-s... - behind paywall unfortunately, so there will be a need to google.
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiscal_multiplier#Net_Governme...
[3](at least because of the feed back loop of +surplus-> -gdp -> -taxes -> -surplus so to achieve a surplus of 2.24 billion more than 2.24 billion in cuts would need to be mead)
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. I'm sorry, no matter how bad 2008 was, it was no World War. His inability to grasp this just boggles the mind. There's a very big difference between war caused debt and economic caused debt (note that I'm basically making these two "deb…
> 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…
Actually Greece Invaded Turkey in WW-I.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Turkish_War_(1919%E2%80%...