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Varoufakis to Publish Notorious Eurogroup Recordings from 2015 Meetings

greece.greekreporter.com

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Re: Varoufakis to Publish Notorious Eurogroup Recordings from 2015 Meetings

#91

Post by mrtksn »

tsimionescu wrote: post #77
mrtksn wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you argue that it is O.K. to game the bank and live a lavish life destroying your own way of living and if the bank catches up and wants you to take measures so you can pay back, the right thing to do would be to jail the people who were gamed or conspired with the people who gamed the bank and simply continue the lavish life and let the people who dod not manage to game the bank(some richer and some poorer than y…

No. The point you are missing is that it is also not ok for the lender to lend everyone a billion dollars, wait for people to default, and then go ask the government to give them a billion dollars back because otherwise they will go bankrupt. If the supply of money has essentially been exhausted, then both borrowers and lenders have been doing something wrong, and it should be BOTH that suffer, so that both are incen…

No, I don't miss that point. Some people should definitely go to jail.

But what is the solution here? Be really angry to the lenders and make them keep writing checks to the fraudulent borrowers?

Re: Varoufakis to Publish Notorious Eurogroup Recordings from 2015 Meetings

#92

Post by xfs »

pavlov wrote: post #86
petermcneeley wrote: post #76

This is about "elections cannot be allowed to change economic policy" It reflects the anti democratic perspective of the Eurogroup and is one of the most fundamental political issues of our times. https://www.google.com/amp/s/markcarrigan.net/2017/05/08/ele...

Greece voluntarily joined a larger currency zone and reaped the benefits for a decade. Should state elections in Mississippi drive US Fed policy?

Reaped the benefits? Greece's GDP dropped 30% since 2008 it and was forced into austerity by the Troika to move debts from the left pockets of Deutsche Bank to the right pockets, with the interests paid for by Greek tax payers.

Re: Varoufakis to Publish Notorious Eurogroup Recordings from 2015 Meetings

#94

Post by [deleted] »

lucianoq wrote: post #40

To the people who think Greece deserved that: lender is responsible for checking how much the borrower can take. My bank reasonably doesn't give me a billion. Default likelihood exists because there is an interest that prices it. When default happens, shame on the borrower and shame on the lender for having been a bad checker or just shame on no one if that default was one of the "expected" and covered by all the deb…

[deleted]

Re: Varoufakis to Publish Notorious Eurogroup Recordings from 2015 Meetings

#95

Post by alexge233 »

Varoufakis only cares about himself, always promoting himself and is just seeking attention. What a joke of a person! He wanted to replace Euros with a crypto-currency as IoU at some point rather than going back to Drachma. The man is an academic, not a very good at that either and a clown of a Politician. His "negotiations" cost the Greek tax payer about 100Bn Euros, and enabled DB to shift their debt to the German taxpayer, passing it as a "financial rescue".

Re: Varoufakis to Publish Notorious Eurogroup Recordings from 2015 Meetings

#96

Post by fifnir »

pavlov wrote: post #86
petermcneeley wrote: post #76

This is about "elections cannot be allowed to change economic policy" It reflects the anti democratic perspective of the Eurogroup and is one of the most fundamental political issues of our times. https://www.google.com/amp/s/markcarrigan.net/2017/05/08/ele...

Greece voluntarily joined a larger currency zone and reaped the benefits for a decade. Should state elections in Mississippi drive US Fed policy?

NY private banks lend money to Mississippi banks. At some later point, the global market crashes and NY ""suddenly discovers"" that Mississippi officials lied about the state's finances. NY now wants their money back in the middle of a world-wide crisis. Mississippi banks can't pay.

Should we force the (next generation of) citizens of Mississippi (who didn't personally lie about anything) to pay all this debt for the next 50 years?

Re: Varoufakis to Publish Notorious Eurogroup Recordings from 2015 Meetings

#97

Post by xkemp »

sykick wrote: post #22
tasubotadas wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happened? It's a success story. I get that people do not like the fact that they can't retire now at 55yo or that they had to privatize a few big national companies, but I think it's a perfect example where the doctor knows better than the patient what's best for them.

My understanding of the situation is that German and French banks flooded Greece with easy credit. And as it always happens under such circumstances people/corporations/governments borrowed heavily and when the crisis hit in 2009 they couldn’t repay. All of the so called bailouts have been aimed at making sure French and German banks didn’t suffer and the ones who did suffer have been the Greek people with the except…

That's an extremely one-sided point-of-view.

The net effect of the whole saga was Greece getting to spend a lot of money in the 90s and 2000s, and the stronger countries of the Eurogroup ending up paying for (at least part) of that.

Focussing on these countries' motivation is somewhat useless speculation, and arguably unfair if you manage to twist it so far around the people paying end up as the bad guys, and the people spending as the victims.

In any case: French and German banks could have absorbed a Greek default, although it would have been painful. Because these banks held only part of the debt[0], it would have always been cheaper to make them whole again and tell Greece to take a hike.

Considering a decade has passed and some things happen, one might also want to reevaluate the motivations ascribed to, for example, Angela Merkel. Does she still strike people as incapable of aiming higher than just immediate parochial needs?

[0]: around 30% IIRC, can't be bothered to look this stuff up again ten years later)

Re: Varoufakis to Publish Notorious Eurogroup Recordings from 2015 Meetings

#99

Post by xfs »

mrtksn wrote: post #83
aazaa wrote: post #67

This article does a poor job of explaining what could be controversial about the 2015 Eurogroup Meeting. Who cares? This just sounds like Euro-Politico Soap Opera. After some digging, I found this: > The Eurogroup on the 11 July 2015 discussed the request by the Greek authorities for financial assistance from the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) and their new proposals for a reform agenda. https://www.europeansourc…

As far as I remember, Varoufakis was personally offended that the eurocrats did not take him seriously and did not engage in a discussion of his ideas. He wrote about it several times, he sounded extremely disappointed that you can't have an academic discussion on that table. I had a really hard time to sympathise with him as I got the impression that he didn't pay attention to the reality of the situation and kept c…

> he didn't pay attention to the reality of the situation

Or he paid too much attention to the reality of the situation.

According to him, as a professional economist, the Euro is structurally unsustainable and is going to implode in the next 2008 because of the way the EU is set up politically creating a situation of a central bank without a country and countries without central banks.

What angered him is the way Eurogroup bureaucrats pretend this situation does not exist, even when they themselves admit they understand the same thing, which, to an academic like him, is a crime against logic.

Re: Varoufakis to Publish Notorious Eurogroup Recordings from 2015 Meetings

#100

Post by [deleted] »

tsimionescu wrote: post #48
tgv wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can politicians take responsible measures if they can be called out on any nonsensical thing? Not that I'm against transparency, but there really are two sides to this. In the best case, politicians act in the interest of the people, which makes publication of their private dealings unwanted. In the worst case, they act against the interest of the people, which can only be dealt with by complete openness and inde…

I disagree completely. If there were real transparency, the public can also, in time, grow together with their politicians, and understand why certain decisions must be taken, and can help the public take a more active and measured role in their own government. Controlling the actions of politicians who explicitly act against the public interest is at best a minor win. Open and honest dialog is the much more importan…

[deleted]
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